"Do Not Be Afraid"

My grandson, a third-grader, goes to a Christian school that's 113 years old. 

I'm going to let that sit for a moment--let you savor it. 

We live in the very last region of Iowa to be settled by Euro-Americans. The reasons for that include lack of railroads, swarms of grasshoppers, distances from waterways; but what those 113 years mean is that some highly principled Dutch Reformed folks put brick upon brick down when the town was little more than a puppy in the prairie grass. 

I'm sure not all the wooden shoe citizenry were taken with the idea of a separate Christian school. Some thought it too conservative, too, well, Dutch. "You're in America now," some pointed out;  "be American."

In 1910, no one argued about a six-day creation. No one worried about sex education, drugs in school, bullying, hate speech. Some believed a "School for Christian Instruction," as some schools in this far corner of Iowa are still named, was needed, not as some sanctified alternative to public, Godless education, but because those who laid the brick professed belief in a sovereign God who ruled every last square inch of his world, which made doing history or geography, literature or math, without acknowledging the Creator's hands was like keeping him in the janitor's room.

For most of my life, I taught in a Christian school, a Christian college. That's why. That's why the old folks in the Schaap and Van Gelder family albums wanted their kids and grandkids somewhere in a Christian school. That's why, in my family, a Christian education is worth all the bucks. 

My grandson, a third-grader, goes to a Christian school that's 113 years old. His faith-based education isn't a protest, it has been for a long time a kind of mandate.

But today--maybe more than ever--Christian believers exist in perilous times, not because we're under persecution from howling atheist mobs, but because we are ourselves engaged in an un-civil war. We fight about evolution, about sex ed, about the place of race and creed, about gay rights and immigration, and about politics and the President. 

Some parents in my grandson's school believe if the school doesn't teach kids about "white privilege," their education isn't an education at all. Others believe the if the school doesn't use every weapon in its arsenal to fight for a six-day creation, what happens in that school can't be "Christian." In this political moment, I wonder whether a 113-year-old Christian school can long endure our times and ourselves.

And then there are moments that make the soul arise, moments when doubt fades, moments when I couldn't be happier my grandson is in a Christian school that's 113 years old, or that his siblings attend a Christian high school down the road. Not long ago, a sweet high school senior named Josh went in for a check-up because things were fuzzy, so fuzzy the doctor sent him immediately to a specialist in Sioux Falls, who found a tumor and sent him, right then and there, into surgery.

The prayers of an entire community stormed the gates of heaven, and Josh somehow let his teachers know that one of the songs a choral group he was in played again and again in his memory when he lay there waiting for surgery--"Do Not Be Afraid," he said.

So that little chorale group stepped out in the hallway and sang "Do Not Be Afraid," and their music and those words echoed off the walls and ceiling and tile floors and wandered into a bundle of adjacent room. Some kids videoed the moment, then stuck it up Facebook.

The music was moving--you can listen in above--but what thrilled the quarrelsome skeptic in me was how the kids from all those classrooms spilled out into hallways for comfort, just like Josh. They were subdued into silence and prayer, a place some of them may have never been before, positioned perilously between very real fear on one side and love and faith on the other. 

What Josh faced that day was very serious, very real, more real than a ball games or a senior prom. For a moment, what happened in those hallways wasn't "high school." 

With all those kids in silence, "Do Not Be Afraid" flowed earnestly into a community profession. It was those kids standing there in fear and faith that made me overwhelmingly happy my own grandchildren were among them in a Christian school. 

kids in the hallways