The Pilgrim’s Way
Dear parents and friends of CCS,
Welcome to the 2026-2027 school year at Community Christian School! We are so grateful you have chosen to invest in your children's future by joining with us in educating them to see the world through the eyes of Jesus Christ.
There are many exciting things happening here at CCS these days, so many that it would be virtually impossible to share them all with you in this brief article. Many of those are covered on other CCS platforms.
I will say that of special note is the construction of the new security perimeter fence. Workers have nearly completed the fence installation, and after that we will be working on openers and locks.
As we begin this year together, I want to draw our focus to one of my favorite scriptures: Psalm 84: 4.
“Happy are the people whose strength is in you, whose hearts are set on the pilgrim's way.”
As we begin a new year, I am reminded that there are many families who are struggling with a great many things: health, finances, relationships, spiritual life with God, etc. Yet for those of us who are in Christ, we have scriptures like the one before us today, where God seems to be stating a flat truth that should be true for everyone.
In some seasons this can even be annoying, since if we were to take our emotional temperature, the reality is that we are not even close to being happy. This seems perplexing even to maturing Christians – and can lead us to open the door to discouragement and even despair. This is especially true when we have multiple challenges come upon us all at once. We become weary, which continues and enables the downward spiral.
So what is God really saying here?
I believe the thrust of this scripture and many like it is this: God is describing normal life in the Kingdom of God, where His rule and reign and values are present and honored as normative, and more important, healthy for us. The broken world and the uncooperative bodies we live in challenge that reality, yet it is still very much true, because the Kingdom of God is here, at least in part.
The reality is that God also defines some words differently than modern usage. “Happy” is one example of this. As strange as it seems to us in the 21st century, the state of being happy is not defined primarily by emotions. In Psalm 84: 4, the word refers to the state of being “blessed,” i.e., complete, lacking nothing, as well as being “greatly favored” by an important person or authority.
This reality may indeed evoke positive personal feelings, but given our earthly state and the very human challenges we all live with every day, our feelings tend to ride the waves far more than we would like. We are, as James says, “driven and tossed by the wind” – we are “unstable in all of our ways”.
In contrast, the “happy” person is tapping into an eternal truth that never changes, and therefore can be thoroughly relied upon in any circumstance. It's not that our feelings are not real – it's that they can be very fickle and untrustworthy, especially about really big things in our lives.
So what does that mean for those of us who are struggling? (Everyone, in some way!)
It means that when we make God our Center, the very strength of our lives, and we rely completely on Him for sustainment, we will be “happy” – by God’s definition. We will be complete, because we are “favored” by the King of the Universe, who has granted all things in Christ.
And this is the foundation to being wholehearted, the CCS theme for this year. We are to build our perceptions and emotional life on Truth, and can trust the Holy Spirit in us to assist us when that trust becomes fleeting. Being wholehearted does not mean being perfect – it means we are convinced of our own incapacity to make it all happen, and in our weakness we acknowledge God as the only one who can truly and sustainably make us strong.
So, as we move forward on the “Pilgrim’s way”, let’s “encourage one another and spur each other on to love and good deeds”. Let’s remind each other to wholeheartedly trust the God who made and saves us.
We can be truly happy, because God is real, good, sovereign and trustworthy – even when circumstances make us feel badly.
Truth, focused upon and trusted over time, yields fruitful results.
May God find us pursuing Him together this year in a spirit of humility, truth and great love.
For CCS and the Kingdom,
Tom