Dear Parents,

Have you ever been in a race or another situation where you were getting tired and were contemplating giving up? Just as defeat or discouragement started to creep in, someone cheered you on or provided you with an encouraging word. This is often the catalyst that will cause you to dig deeper and will carry you to the finish line or help you hit the goal or target. 

The beauty with encouragement is that it can come from anyone, including some of our youngest students. This is part of what we learned this morning from our Encouragement Team, which is made up primarily of students in grades 2 and 3 along with a few from grade 4 and 5. They reminded us of the difference encouragement can make and provided us with some concrete examples of the types of words that we can use to encourage others. This is the heartbeat behind Paul’s words to the Thessalonians as he wrote: “Therefore encourage one another and build each other up, just as in fact you are doing.” (1 Thessalonians 5:11). 

This ties in well with some of the themes that we covered during our Christian Schools Canada Conference in Halifax last week titled “Journeying with Hope”. With any journey, there will be adventures, there will be high and lows, but we need encouragement to persevere and we need each other. One of the images that stuck in my mind is the example of the Pando tree that grows in Utah. From a distance, it appears as if it is a forest made up of hundreds of individual trees with trucks emerging from the ground. In actuality, it is one single organism that shares a common root system and is entirely interconnected and dependent on each other to survive. The key takeaway is that we need each other to thrive and flourish. We cannot do it on our own in our Christian walk and we need an encouraging community to come alongside us to produce the fruit that God desires to see in us. Our prayer is that you will find encouragement within our community and that we can serve and flourish together for God’s glory.

Blessings,

J-D Lussier, Principal