We Need to Give Thanks!

Four years ago, when we met for our 2018 Thanksgiving Service at Robert Blackwood Hall, we revealed a fly-through for the Community Hub. One of the unexpected blessings of our two COVID years was that fact that it was built on time and under budget – two expressions we never usually hear being used to describe a building project in a school.  For those two things, I am incredibly thankful.

The Community Hub – with its sporting, performance, learning, and community gathering possibilities – has been an extraordinary blessing for our school this year. For this amazing facility, I am incredibly thankful to God.

At our Secondary Thanksgiving Service last night, we saw a fly-through of what will be our biggest ever building – the Senior Secondary Building.  It will house learning spaces across five different subject areas, it has multiple floors with interconnections – it will have so many spaces for groups of all different sizes to gather.

The imagination of the architects, our staff, students and others has led to the development of this phenomenal facility. I am thankful for the creativity that has brought this about.

I am thankful too for the fact that is designed to be a 6 Star Green Star rated building: highly efficient, powered by renewables - read more here. It's a marker for how we want to steward God’s good creation in the context of our school’s operations – a witness to those who look in.  I am thankful for the leadership of our DCC Board, that they have taken this important step.

Bridget Willard is a social commentator.  She has said a lot about the nature of faith communities such as our own.  She was recently talking with a group of Christian educators at a conference.  She said, rather provocatively for them, the following: 

“Christian School is not about where it is located.  Christian Schools are not about the buildings. Christian School is what you do. It is who you are.  Christian school should be the human outworking of the person of Jesus Christ.  Don’t go to Christian School, rather – be Christian School."

She’s absolutely right.  Whilst it’s true that, with almost 1600 students in our school nowadays, we have to have the buildings to teach all 75 classes that take place, from Prep to Year 12, during any one period, Christian schooling is still about the people.

And it is the people for whom I am forever thankful.  The teachers, with their pastoral and intellectual nurturing of all the students; the students, for all that they contribute to the classes they attend and as they look out for one another; the staff, as they seek to build one another up in their professional growth.

I am thankful for the parents who deeply engage with the model of learning we have at our school – rooted in the command of Proverbs 22:6  –

Train up a child in the way they should go; even when they are old, they will not depart from it.

More than that, I am thankful for the relationships between parents, as they build fellowship amongst each other while navigating being parents together; and for the way parents and teachers can engage in healthy, hope-filled conversations about the trajectory of education for their children in the world we live in, in 2022. 

I am especially thankful, too, for the way that Friends of Donvale have been strategic and intentional in seeking to bless our community through lots of targeted support of school events.  They have shared hospitality and been welcoming, again and again, in the name of building better connections amongst us.  Mums and Dads, if you can, get involved in what they are doing – theirs is a selfless ministry seeking growth amongst us.

If I were completely transparent, though, I am most thankful to God for the instances that occur between us.  The times where we were taught more about who God is, who He wants us to be and how He wants us to be His people together.  Some of those lessons have not been easy, some we are still learning. 

Sometimes we've needed patience, understanding, forgiveness.  I am thankful for all these learnings, and for the mercy and grace extended within our community. 

I am thankful for our dependence on the Bible and the life of Jesus as our guide – our marker and our example.  And I am thankful that God continually teaches us new things – as students, as teachers, as parents, as community together.

If you can think of someone in our school community, who has blessed you by what they did or what they have said, if circumstances and events at school this year have made you and/or your family a better place – take a moment in prayer to name that person or those happenings for which you are thankful. 

Let's all thank God and give Him the glory for all the great things He has done amongst us this year.