Tue 4/30/2024 3:45 PM
As we approach the last day of our first year of school at Columbus Classical Academy, it is tempting to reflect on all that we have achieved. After all, it has not been easy, and much, indeed, has been accomplished. Faculty, staff, parents, scholars, board members, donors, and community members all—individually and together—have worked diligently, given sacrificially, acted virtuously. They have transformed the idea of a good education into a living, breathing school that delivers on that promise and is making a real difference in the hearts, minds, and lives of our students. We have, in many ways, done precisely what we set out to do. But as I consider all the good in our inaugural year, I cannot help but think that it would be a twofold mistake to spend very much time in a posture of celebration or congratulation when May 22 rolls around.
For one thing, our work has only just begun. Giving birth is not the end but rather the beginning of parenting. As I noted in our opening ceremony in August, the journal of James McHenry, a Maryland delegate to the Constitutional Convention, famously records that on the final day of the convention, a lady asked Benjamin Franklin, “Well Doctor, what have we got – a republic or a monarchy?” To which Franklin famously replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” Franklin rightly understood that the work of sustaining an enterprise is often more difficult and demanding than even the work of establishing it in the first place. And so, three weeks hence, we will smile at the achievements of our inaugural year…and then we will promptly get back to work building, and growing, and improving, and sustaining this very good school.
But even more important than the work that remains to be done is our present sense of gratitude. George Washington—the man who, as much as any other, could have claimed credit for his role in the founding of our nation, declared in his 1789 inaugural address that, “[n]o people can be bound to acknowledge and adore the Invisible Hand which conducts the affairs of men more than those of the United States. Every step by which they have advanced to the character of an independent nation seems to have been distinguished by some token of providential agency.” You see, Washington understood as well as any that America enjoyed the blessings of liberty—not the entitlements, or the rights, or the merited rewards, or even the earned successes of liberty, but rather its divinely bestowed blessings.
For he knew to be true what the apostle Paul said in 1 Corinthians 3:7: “So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth.” And for that—for the blessing of this first year of Columbus Classical Academy—we are, above all, thankful.
