For whom are you thankful this Christmas season?
God gets all the credit for every blessing Providence Classical Christian School has received. What do we have that we did not receive from our Heavenly Father through the grace of His Son Jesus Christ?
The coming Christmas season is a time when we worship God for His greatest gift and then imitate Him by giving gifts to those whom we love.
Jean-Paul Sartre famously wrote, “Hell is other people.” But, while Christians know that people can be the source of a great deal of suffering and pain, they also affirm that one of God’s greatest blessings is the people He places in our lives.
This truth is what the psalmist meditated on in Psalm 133:
Behold, how good and pleasant it is
when brothers dwell in unity!
It is like the precious oil on the head,
running down on the beard,
on the beard of Aaron,
running down on the collar of his robes!
It is like the dew of Hermon,
which falls on the mountains of Zion!
For there the Lord has commanded the blessing,
life forevermore.
“Brothers” – the people who surround us in our families, churches, neighborhoods, and communities – are an amazing gift from the Lord’s hand: they bring us joy, lift us up, comfort us, and give us purpose. The Christmas season is a particularly apt time to meditate on and give thanks for God’s gift of people in your life since Christmas is a celebration of God’s gift of the person of His Son.
The Apostle Paul ended his magnificent Epistle to the Romans with an often-overlooked litany of greetings and thanksgiving for the people who meant so much to him (Rom 16:1-16). We should imitate St. Paul by thanking God for the people He has put in our lives and sharing that thanks with them.
For whom are you thankful this Christmas season?
I am certainly thankful for the people who make up Providence Classical Christian School. The children, families, faculty, and board members who are the Providence family are such a blessing every day. My life is richer and my family is stronger because God has placed these people around me.
I know you agree.
So let me encourage you to be a blessing to the faculty and staff of Providence Classical Christian School this Christmas season. Your children’s teachers work hard to serve your family each day – and they do a great job. So be thankful to the Lord, and find a way to lift them up: a kind word, an encouraging note, a small gift.
And finally, thank you, parents, for the blessing you are to the Providence family. I praise the Lord for you daily, and particularly during this Christmas season.