Trinitas Blog

Last week during Morning Meeting our theme was “Direct My Steps According to Your Word.” All week we read passages that spoke of God’s great desire to see His people living according to His word. On Friday I told the students I used to know a preacher who had a habit of saying, “If you think all there is to the Christian life is getting saved and baptized, then as soon as you get saved and baptized we should take you out behind the church and shoot you.” This was his crude way of saying to the congregation that Jesus hadn’t saved them to sit around and wait for the rapture or the second coming or whatever comes next. They weren’t saved for death, but for life.

To do a thing well, you have to begin well—you have to start off on the right foot. At Trinitas we want every day to go well, so we begin every day with a short time of devotion and worship we call Morning Meeting.

At 7:50 each morning the entire student body gathers together in the Grand Hall where we start Morning Meeting by reading God’s word.

As varsity sports seasons get underway this weekend, I want to remind you what it means to represent Trinitas as a fan. You can find a thorough explanation of “The Ideal Trinitas Sports Fan” in the Family Handbook, but I want to give you a few quick reminders.

We Americans are pretty independent people. In fact, independence is often considered a hallmark of Americanness, a particular American virtue if you will. For the next few minutes, however, please allow me to celebrate the antithesis to personal independence, that is, the virtue of community. I have been inspired recently to extol the virtues of community by the many parents and students at Trinitas who work behind the scenes to support each other and the school.

In Eph 4:3, Paul says the Ephesians ought to be “eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” While we know Paul wrote this letter specifically to the church at Ephesus, and with a specific context in mind, we also know that if Paul’s exhortation was true for Christians at Ephesus, it is true for us at Trinitas. Maintaining the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace is no easy task, though, no matter where it is being attempted because we’re all sinners, especially talented at offending each other, hurting each other’s feelings, and generally getting in each other’s way. But when the place you’re attempting to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace is a school where 200 people are living in community each day, it is a difficult task to say the least.

With drama underway, it seems like a fitting place to unpack the pursuit of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. On the stage students are called to imagine life from another perspective. Students wrestle with not only what someone says, but how they say it and then why. Actors humble themselves and explore a nature not their own. In this putting on of a character, students are able to actively pursue the true, the good, and the beautiful.

When teachers and administrators from other schools visit Trinitas, one of the things they love is that all of our students sing. Music is not an elective at Trinitas; singing is not optional. We sing to start the day, we sing in music class, we sing in other classes, we sing in choir, and we sing to end the day. It is not a spontaneous thing—though song does occasionally erupt unannounced—it is intentional. We work at it. Even those of us who do not naturally sing well work at it (even harder in fact).

At this time in the history of the world, when our calendar is controlled largely by a capitalist machine of our own making (read WalMart, Amazon, etc.), perhaps we Christians should buck the system a little, remind the secular establishment that we’re still here and still seeing things just a little differently than they. That’s one reason we talk about the season of Advent at Trinitas.