The Song of Blessing

At the end of each campus day, all the students and staff of VCS gather for a final blessing. It's one of my favorite times of the day. We sing the Song of Blessing by Sara Groves:

“May God give you eyes to see,

All that is good, all that is good.

The courage for anything,

May you be strong, may you be strong.

May God give you ears to hear,

His loving voice, his loving voice;

Speaking all around you, all around, and deep inside.”

I often tear up while we're singing this simple song because it holds several of my deepest prayers for the students at VCS.

We and the world we live in are out of joint. There is evil, there is sin, there is temptation, and there is just pure brokenness. Things don't work the way that God created them to function. Our sin and others' sin throughout time has affected and still affects every tiny bit of our world. The older I get, the easier it has become to dwell in all of this sadness. I am tempted to only see the brokenness and not all of the good gifts God has given us, or how He has reached down into our broken world in merciful ways to mend the shattered pieces. But the ability to see glimmers of God's goodness in the midst of our brokenness, and then to ultimately see the promise of the final mending Christ brought when He entered our broken world to save us from our sin - that is the hope that Christ gives us. Our desire is that as VCS students in 5th grade read about the merciful ways God works to mend the brokenness of disease and illness through the painstaking and exhausting work of scientists like Joseph Lister and Louis Pasteur, and as VCS students in 6th grade read about how God provided the imperfect person of Alfred the Great to lead the Britons to safety from the Vikings, they begin to see this hope. This practice of looking for the good that God gives us and being mindfully thankful - of being hopeful - that is an ability that we hope God blesses our community with.

And in this dark world, we all need courage; righteous courage. We don't know what God is going to call each of us to today, tomorrow, or next year. But we do know it will be interacting with a broken world. We know it will be part of His work in us and part of his redeeming all things back to Himself, bringing peace, defending the defenseless, caring for the needy, and proclaiming His name. And therefore, we know that it will be hard and possibly dangerous. C.S. Lewis wrote, “Since it is so likely that they will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage.” Our hope is that VCS students begin to know what righteous courage looks like, tastes like, and feels like from the literature that we read, the history that we study, the scientists we examine, and the scripture that we memorize. But since being righteously courageous requires not just making one decision to do what is right, but making a string of many, many decisions to bravely stay on the path of righteousness, we train for what pressing further on and further in feels like. It's hard to persevere! But, the more that any of us taste what digging deep yields, or gather muscle memory on what it feels like to push through the hard and difficult things, the more that we have the courage to try it again.

And in all of the work that God gives us to bring peace and light to our broken and hurting world, we all need to hear His loving voice speaking truth and grace to us inside and all around. We need His voice telling us that He is our God and we are His precious children. He is our shepherd and we are His beloved sheep. Just as Aslan's breath heals, so does God's voice bring healing to our souls. This is one of the reasons that the truth that we're all hearing, memorizing, and proclaiming during morning assembly is so important. These truths are some of the ways God will speak to us and our children now and in the future. Truths of who He is and who we are and of how much He loves us and what He has done for us. This truth brings courage, it brings wisdom, and it brings healing.

These precious souls that sit in the hallway and sing this song with me every week; we pray that God's hand of blessing will be firmly on them all of their lives. We want Him to care for them, protect them, to grow them and bless them. We want them to see God's goodness, to have the courage to be part of God's goodness to our broken world, and to know God's voice saying "you are my child, whom I love". Singing this together at the end of the day is a way for us all to be reminded of this hope and prayer.

Jody StromDecember 3, 2019