Wise Words With...

Graciousness

I want to thank everybody for their patience during the end of term and during the last week as we have been working with the concreters to upgrade our driveway. I’m sure you will appreciate that this is a vast improvement in the quality of the driveway and we look forward to the completion of the project.

I also need to thank the maintenance staff and wider community who have been involved in the traffic flow. During our conference week, I went to drive out the driveway at the end of the day and I saw the consternation on the face of one of our maintenance staff when I went to drive out the wrong way. It was clearly marked, I just got it wrong. And then a car came to enter in and saw I was going out and the expression on the face of the maintenance staff was communicating so clearly, ‘if the principal of the school can’t get it right, what hope do we have.’ But they were very gracious towards me, and we have had a good laugh about it afterwards.

Graciousness is not one of our values, but the word comes from the concept of grace which communicates God’s unmerited favour towards us. I would suggest that the maintenance staff were being very gracious in their response to my lack of driving awareness. I didn’t deserve their gentle response, but they were kind towards me anyway. And of course we need to be gracious towards them. I imagine that they must go spare having to deal with multiple people like me who get it wrong with the change in the driving conditions.

Getting it wrong is one thing, deliberately ignoring their instructions is another. Can I encourage us to not disregard the directives we have been given because we want to save one minute off our trip and turn right when we should go left or whatever it might be. I think you will agree that despite the driveway challenges, it has all gone very smoothly and a big part of that is down to the thought they have put into the situation to stop gridlock from happening and what we can do is follow the directives which is our small part to play.

Speaking of our values, on Wednesday, a new image went up on the western wall of the Year 3 and 4 building, displaying our values. This image will be a great daily reminder to primary and secondary students of the qualities that define us as a Nowra Christian School community and will prompt conversations in classrooms regarding the images and the bible passages that have been selected to provide the biblical imperative for our community to adopt these values.