A Message from Head of School, Tom Argersinger
Dear Parents and Friends of CCS,
As many of you know, the season of Advent is a season of waiting.
What can get lost in the busyness is the simple question:
What are you waiting for?
I think in one sense it’s different for everyone.
One person reading these words today is waiting for healing, to be made whole.
Another is waiting for a loved one to find their way back to Jesus.
Still another is waiting for their “ship to come in” i.e. receive their financial blessing.
And there are some, somewhat strangely, who have no real idea what they are waiting for.
And it is this last group that are the most anxious, since they do not know what it is they seek — there is just a vague, floating feeling that whatever they have is not enough — there is a void in their life that seems unfillable.
I’m talking about Christians.
There are many who claim the name of Christ who have almost completely lost touch with the person of Jesus Christ, and all they have left is a memory of what once was.
Their relationship with the Bible and the church is perfunctory and shallow at best, yet they keep on (sometimes) reading and going, mostly to please someone else, or out of a stubborn sense of duty.
In some ways these folks are the most miserable of all.
And this gets at the second, greater and more universal sense of what we are waiting for.
Unlike the famous characters of the existential play Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, we who believe in Jesus and are committed to follow Him are waiting for One who will surely appear.
In fact, history teaches us that Jesus did appear, in time and space (to borrow a line from Francis Schaefer).
And, further, the word of God assures us of this, in the penultimate verse of the entire Bible;
He who testifies about these things says, “Yes, I am coming soon.”
Amen! Come Lord Jesus!
Rev. 22:20 CSB
So now we have a choice: Will we believe this, taking Jesus at His word?
Or has the creeping materialism, radical personal autonomy, rationalism, functional naturalism, idolatry and syncretism of our age so infected our hearts and minds and souls that when we hear these things we find ourselves locked in a weight of debilitating doubt?
Let me hasten to say that I’m not pointing fingers here. I too have had my moments when the crunch of circumstances and my own wayward heart has inexorably led me to this very precipice.
So what has pulled me back from the abyss?
Often it has been the very real sense that if Christ is not the answer, what possibly could be?
The history of mankind after about 1400 AD is marked with desperate search for something that can take the pace of God in our lives (with AI being the most recent attempt). Yet nothing provides the completeness of the Christian response to the very real world we live in.
To whom shall we go? (the disciple Peter said) You (Jesus) have the words of life. We have believed and come to know that You are the Holy One of God.”
John 6:68,69 CSB
Note the emphasis on process. We begin with a naked belief that we choose, i.e. I choose to believe that Jesus is who He said He is, and go forward on that basis. And then, as we show up on a near daily basis and talk to God honestly about where we really are, something amazing happens over time.
We slowly “come to know” that He is, after all, the Holy One of God.
What began as an unlikely choice of our will, has become real in the most wonderful way. Jesus comes right into the midst of our darkness, in a profound and powerful sense.
We “know” that He is here with us, because we have “practiced” being with Him as we open His word and listen to His voice on a regular basis.
And we wait, not as those who have no hope, but as people who have been graced with what is actually the most powerful and beautiful Truth in the entire history of mankind:
Jesus is God. He has moved “into our neighborhood” (Peterson). And He knows my name.
He. Knows. My. Name.
O glorious Reality! O what undeserved grace and mercy! What a Saviour!
And so, brothers and sisters, this Advent we do wait. Not in desperation, but in a sure belief that Jesus did indeed come to this earth, and in glorious hope that He will, without a doubt, come again.
The new heavens and the new earth will be our Reality.
And I’m pretty sure that at that point we will look at each other and say: How could we ever have doubted this?
For CCS and the Kingdom,
Tom