If It Ain't Broke . . .

When God builds something, he always has a distinct game-plan: he breaks stuff apart first.  When he "built" the first man and woman, he broke Adam in two (the removed rib on the one hand, sleeping Adam on the other).  The rib became a woman, and then he put the two parts back together: Adam and Eve became "one flesh" (Gen. 2:24).  When God breaks, he's always up to something glorious.

This breaking-while-building method is all over the place in Scripture.  God broke Jacob's hip right before he blessed him with land in Canaan (Gen. 32:25); God "breaks" the children of Israel with slavery in Egypt while he simultaneously builds them into a nation of 600,000+ (Exod. 12:37); God "breaks" David by allowing Saul to chase him without cause, all to build him up into a faithful king (1 Sam. 19 - 2 Sam. 5); the nation of Israel is "broken" through sin and exile so that God can bring them back to Canaan and build them up again for his glory (1 Kings 25:21, Ezra 2:1); and of course, Christ's body was broken for us on the cross so that we could be resurrected -- rebuilt -- into new life with Christ.

The key point is this: stories with hardship in them, where people and things get broken, are the rule, not the exception.  They're God's way, not God's mistake.

Right now, ACA is doing a lot of building.  We're "building" lives (metaphorically) in the classroom, and we're building classrooms (actually) over at Vietnamese Central Baptist Church.  What does this mean?  That there are still road-blocks and fender-benders ahead.  There will be lactic acid buildup and sore muscles, and probably some band-aids needed.

But this is how glory works.  It stoops, it scrapes its knee, and it gets its hands dirty -- like Christ did.  The way up is down.  We delight ourselves in the Lord -- the humble, unexpected ways of the Lord -- and he will give us the desires of our hearts.

Grace and Peace, Nate Ahern

Like Spitting into the Wind

As our school grows and time passes, more of our students are moving into the Logic Phase of the Trivium.  In light of current relativistic cultural trends which see man's personal desires as autonomous, and truth as a shape-shifting thespian, we have a key job as educators and parents to give our kids the tools they need to apply universal moral standards to today's ideas.  We have to show them how to judge between right and wrong.  If a new, controversial law is passed, will they be able to point effectively to a fixed standard of truth that is applicable?  Or will they wave their hands despairingly, get shrill, and have nothing much to say?

But today, "right" and "wrong" are strange words.  What can they really mean?  And who's to say?  Surely you aren't telling me that I must conform to your personal beliefs?  You're free to believe what you like -- you have a right to your outmoded religious convictions -- but keep them out of the public square.  Keep them away from my personal choices.

So this is a tricky business.  The Logic Phase should not teach the lofty art of ramming dogma down disagreeing throats.  As an obvious but crucial caveat, unless we teach our children to generously sprinkle their arguments with love, mix them with a few handfuls of minced pride, and bake them with bellies full of laughter, all the perfect syllogisms and proofs they can muster will fly back into their faces, like spitting into the wind.  As someone once said, "There is a deeper right than being right."

So we are beginning to give our children tools of argument and debate.  But as any good carpenter knows, sharp tools in unskilled hands just lead to a bloody mess.

Grace and Peace, Nate Ahern

Not by Steering a Nifty Joystic

When I was growing up, I remember hearing about how some acquaintances of ours had decided to do "unschooling."  Replete with the wisdom of modern educational philosophies, they let their kids choose their own curriculum start to finish, which turned out to involve things like horseback riding between 12:00PM - 2:00PM -- and then not much else.

My 12-year-old self was agape. Flummoxed.  Nonplussed.  (And probably a little envious.)

When there are no fixed standards in play for education, you can get a whole lot of interesting results, all of them (of course!) equally valid.  Biff is a math whiz and publishes a paper on neutrino detection by the time he is nine years old (nice job, Biff), whereas Tuppy likes to get up at 10AM, play video games till four, and then kick around some blocks till dinner ("I love how hands-on Tuppy is!" says his mother).  Some kids like to go to class and work hard, others prefer SnapChat Mondays.  It's all a beautiful matter of personal choice.  Our precious children are learning about what they love.

One of the crucial things for us to understand as parents and educators is that this kind of relativistic educational philosophy is no surprise at all if we don't have anywhere to hang our hat.  If we can't point to a universal standard that says, "Here, not there; this, not that," then why shouldn't our kids do what they want?  We can say that they'll have a miserable life if they don't work hard -- but what about (says Tuppy) the miserable life I'm having right now by doing all this dumb homework?  What about the students' feelings? Who died and crowned my daddy's educational views king?

This may seem far-fetched, but given current educational trends and philosophies, it isn't far off.  And even the best-raised kids like to intellectually gripe, and someday they will be asking questions about why all this rigor is really necessary? When they do, will they have a standard of excellence and a standard of beauty to point to in answer to their questions?

The Bible has many principles and few methods, and so we shouldn't thwack our kiddies on the mazzard with it and tell them to get to work.  But we should always teach our children, gently and joyfully, that Scripture shows us rich, gospel life in full color -- and that kind of life is replete with hard work, sacrifice, stamina, and eyes trained to see God's grace and beauty. Not a life you can get to by steering a nifty joystick.

Grace and Peace, Nate Ahern

Fighting Blindness

Little kids bring us back to basics.  My wife and I knew this was coming before we had children, and we haven't been disappointed.  Our Clyde and Haley love stuff.  They can't enough of it.  Every morning when they wake up, their over-sized grins (and body convulsions) shout one thing: let me see more stuff!  Except for them, it's not "stuff."

It's magic.

Toys, Mom's eyes, Dad's grab-able nose, a new book, sun making checkered patterns on the floor, fluttering pages, mallards on the frozen pond -- dreams come true.  And we've discovered that they are right.  Those things are magic, and we had only begun to slowly stop noticing them.  We had grown up.

In Orthodoxy, Chesterton (who loved kids) said this:

The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms used in the fairy books, "charm," "spell," "enchantment." They express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery. A tree grows fruit because it is a magic tree. Water runs downhill because it is bewitched. The sun shines because it is bewitched. 

Bewitched by the loving, adventurous hand of God.  Our children will grow and mature.  They will move from arithmetic to calculus and from dependence to independence.  But they must never lose their sense of wonder and observation that they first had as little children.  They will observe more somberly, more deeply -- but always with open eyes for God's countless gifts.

In the midst of grades, registration deadlines, homework, and extracurricular events, this is a fundamental mark of true education: fighting blindness.  Keeping eyes of wonder open.

Grace and Peace, Nate Ahern

The Trivium for Life

Life is full of phases.  We enter them, we pass through them, and then we're done.  Just how it's supposed to be.   But as we come out the other side of a phase, we always carry something permanent away.

This is one of the beauties of the Trivium, both for us and our children.  Here's why:

1. In the Grammar Stage, students learn by repetition and singing in class because . . . they love repetition and singing at home ("Mommy? Mommy?  Mommy?" or three-hour loops of a single chorus from Frozen).  It's a phase.  But even though they leave the Grammar Phase in 6th Grade, we want them to carry its basic outlook into adulthood -- like God.  As Chesterton said, "It is possible that God says every morning, 'Do it again' to the sun; and every evening, 'Do it again' to the moon . . . [He] has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.”

2. In the Logic Stage, students learn how to think neatly in all their classes.  Why not theistic Evolution?  Why did Rome fall?  Why is this story in your history text and not that one?  Why are you right and they wrong?  Who says?  Kids like being argumentative just because at this age.  It's a phase.  But we want them to carry Logic's basic outlook permanently -- like God.  "Come, let us reason together, says the Lord" (Is. 1:18), and "In the beginning was the Word" (John 1:1).

3. In the Rhetoric Stage, students learn how to make their knowledge persuasive and beautiful.  They're interested in making people believe them (especially college admissions officers).  It's a phase.  But we want them to carry Rhetoric's basic outlook permanently -- like God.  "The words of the Lord are pure words: as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times" (Ps. 12:6).

What we put into our kids doesn't easily come out -- and when it comes to the Trivium, that's a very good thing.

Grace and Peace, Nate Ahern

Running Toward Challenges

As you probably know, I've been emphasizing hero-and-dragon themes in Chapel this year.  This is not because I want to reduce Scripture to Andersen's Fairy Tales, or make knights-errant out of our little boys (and girls), but because this kind of story-metaphor is so central to both education and Christianity.  Knights and dragon-killers lay down their lives by definition.  Christ was a warrior, but he beat his enemies by laying down his life.  Christ (like David) was a giant-killer, but he beat that giant (Death) by submitting to the will of the Father.  Then the Father gave him a seat at his right hand.  That's the heart of the gospel: spectacular joys and victories by means of suffering and death.

It's the heart of Christian education, too. Suffering, then reward.  Struggle, then success.  Grunting and hair-tugging over math problems at the dining table, then the light bulb.  As the writer of Hebrews might have said, "For the moment, all studying and homework seem painful rather than pleasant, but later they yield the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by them" (Heb. 12:11).

Is this a trivialization of Scripture?  Not a bit.  One of the Bible's great commands is that we must educate our children according to high gospel standards (Deut. 6:6-9), and if we do this well, we are teaching our children to be giant-killers.  As David "ran out to meet" Goliath (1 Sam. 17:48), we're teaching our children to run toward every challenge.  As Christ did not run away from the cross (Luke 22:42), we're teaching our children not to run away from difficulty and pain in the classroom.  We are teaching them to grow.

God's stories always end well.  Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward (Job 5:7), often tragic trouble, but God's purposes for us and our children are always good.  These are great, biblical truths for all of life that we want to get into our students' bones now.  Work is hard, and they will sometimes fail, but that is not the end of the story.

Grace and Peace, Nate Ahern

What's Your Line?

As we continue the slow, wonderful task of teaching our children the love of learning, we have to be aware that at some point they might call our bluff.  "I'm supposed to love learning?  Just like you don't, Pops?"  If we never crack a book, or if our kids see our recreation time as little more than Facebook surfing (and they're always watching us), the game will be up sooner or later.  If we want our kids to love learning, we've got to love learning, too.  And that means knowing a wise thing or two about basic fields of study.

Recently, I mentioned a few fundamentals on the importance of Science, particularly as related to typical classical-Christian-school pitfalls.  History is another core subject -- and even more foundational -- that we must have some love of, or respect for, if we want our children to engage the culture and redeem the time.

But frankly, this is tough.  History, for today's generation, is a cultural weirdo.  Uncool.  Irrelevant, unless you're into that sort of thing.  Sequestered. History is now over there for those people.  (You like History, and I like my fries with cheese.)  And those people either (at best) "read biographies" as a hobby, or (at worst), if they're an academic heavyweight, swing History around like a sledgehammer for the sake of pet political agendas.

But that's false history.

History is more than events and more than a subject in school. Studying it is more than just reading a novel that actually happened. Getting history into your bones is a lot like getting wisdom into your bones -- a task the Bible is constantly setting us to.  "See him, son?  Don't do that.  See wisdom over there?  Be like her."  In short, history is a life-long study of wisdom for the wise.  Here's why:

History tells great stories. There are few things more compelling than a good yarn or tale.  But when those tales are actually real, their force is huge. It may be that truth is sometimes stranger than fiction, but truth is always a better story. Fiction has appeal and vitality, but a story that’s true has the unstoppable power of reality. “Did that really happen? How is that possible? I can’t imagine doing that myself. I want to be like them.” History excites questions about real things. History inspires action.  And that's the kind of inspiration we want for our students.

History involves real people. Poorly written textbooks that are strong on dates, controversies, and propaganda are pretty good at making historical figures look like figures and not people, but a true history, in all its romping, story-telling glory shows them as men. It shows them as women. They lived as we live. They thought the thoughts we think. They struggled with the same temptations. They ate, slept, went to the bathroom, and dressed. They had quirks and personalities. Of course they were great. Of course they were noble. Of course they were evil. This is why they are in books. But we forget that they were human as we are human, in every particular, and this should give us perspective, respect, wisdom, and inspiration. God died for them, too.

We are history’s actors. The present is now the past. History is not just about those people over there: it is also about us. Just as the men and the women of the past shaped events to bring us to now, so we are shaping now to make the future. This is our sobering and fantastic responsibility. We are called. We have roles to fulfill.  And our children are watching us.

History is thankfulness, because it gives us an ability to honor our forbears. We owe everything to those who went before us. Our primary attitude should be, “How is it possible that we have so much?” and never “Why do we have so little?” Why should any of life be even remotely pleasant? Why are we free? Why can we choose our religion? Why can we have any beliefs we wish? Why financial well-being? Why any finances at all? Why are we educated? Unless we are content to forget origins and assume all these things are rights, history gives us reason to be thankful in everything. Those who went before us gave all of themselves to us.

History is thankfulness, because it gives us an ability to condemn our forbears and avoid their paths. History is full of not-so-good people. History is full of vice personified. Knowing history allows us to discriminate and condemn, which (done the right way) furthers the goal of humanity.

History is teleological, not cyclical. History has an end. It has a goal. It’s true that history repeats itself because of the changelessness of human nature, but this is not the overall character of history. History is driving toward something. It is intentional. From the dawn of time, through the rise and fall of many civilizations and religions, there has been progression. Knowledge has grown steadily. The stories of law, politics, philosophy, medicine, and religion have developed and matured. We're headed somewhere -- and that somewhere is that real (historical) future date when "the earth will be full of the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea." (Hab. 2:14)

So act. We're in a Story. What's our line? Do we know our cues? How will we respond to the romping, unpredictable, gritty adventure of it all?

Love the Story you're in. Walk up and say hello to the great men and women who have gone before you. They're all a big part of why you're here now.

Grace and Peace, Nate Ahern

Two Christmas Trees

At Christmas, we get down to one of the roots of Christianity.  God, greater than Zeus, Odin, Vishnu, Allah, or any of the other impersonal constructs of our superstitious imaginations, came off his throne of glory, into a bed of straw, and onto a cross to rescue us from death.  Immortal, invisible, God only-wise became mortal and visible so that he could be a legitimate hero in our Story, so that he could shed human blood for human sins, and so that he could die a real death to save us from real damnation.  At Christmas, this all started.  At Christmas, our hero-knight entered the story.

I recently told this another way to our students in Assembly.  In the Garden of Eden, Adam sinned at a tree.  At Calvary, Christ (the "second Adam") saved us on a tree (the cross).  At the Garden of Eden, Adam ate the forbidden fruit and received the cup of God's wrath.  In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus accepted the cup of God's wrath on our behalf.

So as we gear up for Christmas and enjoy our decorated trees, let's think about the two historical Trees they point to -- Adam's sinful tree and Christ's redemptive "tree."  And as we look at Baby Jesus underneath the tree, let's remember (in songwriter Andrew Peterson's words) this baby's past resume: Maker of the Moon, Author of the Faith.  And now, lying in the feeding trough, his next job is to slay the Dragon.

And all of it is for us.

Grace and Peace, Nate Ahern

Seconds on Mashed Potatoes

One of the reasons Thanksgiving is such a great holiday is its role as a gospel metaphor.  Year after year, we sit down at sagging tables and eat turkeys that somehow have gone from small egg to large, soporific bird.  We eat breads, fruits, and vegetables that have magically come out of the dirt.  And then we mix flour and fat (think I am the bread of life and the fat belongs to the Lord) and drizzle it over the top of our meal.  Then we eat.

This is the gospel, and this is grace.  Gifts from God's hand, received by God's people.  Unmerited blessings, accepted with gratitude.  We were broken, now we are healed.  We were condemned, now we are forgiven.  We were empty, now we are filled.

But this grace/thanksgiving/gospel has two sides.  A gift is given . . . but that gift must also be received.  Jesus said, "it is more blessed to give than to receive" (true), but for some of us, it can be harder to receive than to give.  Yet this is exactly what God calls us to.  Acceptance.  Gratitude.  Guiltless consumption.  God gives to us lavishly, and it's our job to grin big and have seconds on mashed potatoes.

Can we tie this in to education?  Of course.  As parents and teachers, let's view education as a gift, and each day of classes as another rich Thanksgiving table.  We're here to serve our children a joyous academic feast, and like mothers who work hard to make their tables beautiful, we want our students to work hard devouring the meals placed on them.  Just like David says: "Taste and see that the Lord is good!" (Ps. 34:8)

Grace and Peace, Nate Ahern

Kill the Dragon, Get the Girl

In ACA assemblies and chapels, I have often reminded students that the whole point of the Bible is to "kill the dragon, get the girl."  This perspective of the Story of Scripture stems from Christ Church and minister Doug Wilson's teaching of his own family, and while this certainly isn't the only way to state the Bible's purpose, I think it has valuable lessons for us, particularly for our kids.  Boiling down the Bible into sound bytes can be problematic (just like mixing metaphors), but this one is a winner.  Here's why.

The Bible is a fairy tale.  It is the first and greatest of fairy tales, and it's the Story that Grimm, Anderson,  Asbjørnsen and Moe, and Perrault were reflecting, whether they knew it or not.  If you know anything about a good fairy tale, you know that it almost always needs two essentials: a dragon (that gets killed by a brave knight) and a girl (that gets saved by a brave knight).  And that's exactly what the Bible delivers.

This is the Gospel in a nutshell: the Dragon ("that old serpent," Rev. 20:2) is hunted down and killed by Christ (the knight on a white horse, Rev. 19:11), and he saves us from our sins to be his bride (Rev. 19:7).  Christ kills the dragon and gets the girl.  Christ defeats Satan and saves his people.  Christ throws down death, then throws a huge marriage feast.

This is how we must speak of the Bible to our children, as a story, and not as moral platitudes.  The great men and women of Scripture understood the Story they were in, and they acted with faith.  The Scribes and Pharisees read only the law, and they were condemned (Gal. 3:10).  The Scribes and Pharisees went to theology conferences and didn't read fun books with their kids.

So how do we apply this fairy-tale truth with our families?  Read the Bible (in big chunks, with all the knobby parts) to your kids.  Ask them how it's pointing toward Christ's conquest of sin.  Ask them which characters are like Christ.  Ask them which characters are like Satan.  Dragon-killing and bride-saving themes are all through every chapter of every book, some of them explicit, some implied.  To prime the pump with a few of the explicit stories-within-the-Story-of-the-Bible, think about these tales and why they've got a spot in Holy Writ:

• God promises Adam that he will crush the Snake's head (Satan, via second-Adam Christ) (Gen. 3:15).

• Pharaoh tries to "crush" Moses' head (Exod. 1:16), but Moses ends up sending the Red Sea waters over Pharaoh's head (Exod. 14:28).

• Joshua "crushes" the unrighteous heads of the Canaanites, cursed descendants of Noah's son Ham (Gen. 9:25).

• Jael (a woman) hammers a tent peg into the Canaanite Sisera's head (Judges 4:21).

• Abimelech (wicked son of Gideon) is crushed to death when a woman drops a stone on his head from a tower (Judges 9:53).

• Saul defeats Nahash the Ammonite (1 Sam. 11:1, 11), whose name literally means "serpent."

• David crushes Goliath's head with a smooth stone -- Goliath, who wore "an armor of scales" (lit., 1 Sam. 17:5), just like a serpent.

But those are only a few crumbs from the cake.  Let's dish up thick slabs for our kids -- that Christ is in the business of saving us from wickedness and sorrow, crushing serpent-heads, and bringing us joy.  Christ goes to Hades so that we don't have to. For Christ, the way to life is through death, just like it is for us.  The path to glory is through the grave.  It wasn't coincidence that Tolkien took Aragorn through the Paths of the Dead on the eve of his final triumph and entry into Gondor as king.  Fallen man likes to think that life is followed by death, but it is really life that swallows up death.  It's impossible to get away from this truth.  First is death, then life.  First is sin, then salvation.  First is sorrow, then gladness.  First is pain, then joy.  We can't have the second without the first, because this is God’s way.  God loves to redeem us, and he cannot redeem us without us being lost.