The Elijah School

Why do we do it?

I’ve been thinking a lot about why we do what we do at Elijah School.  Teaching non-traditional learners isn’t easy; they require a lot of attention and a lot of brain power.  There isn’t any prestige.  We are constantly under financial pressure and there certainly aren’t any monetary rewards.  Students can be physically and emotionally draining, especially when they are struggling with a new topic.  Or when they are struggling on Monday morning with the same topic they knew hands-down 48 hours before on Friday.  Sometimes it is frustrating almost beyond endurance.

It isn’t easy to explain, but four words have been buzzing round in my head for weeks now: taken, blessed, broken, and given.   At first I figured I was just anticipating Easter, but then Pete Scott spoke to our church on the very same words.  And in church on two nights ago – Maundy Thursday, the night of the Last Supper – I thought about how those words are inseparable from Communion, from Peter, the Passion, and the life of every Christian. 

Many of our students have the broken part down all too well; they’ve been beaten down, discouraged, and criticized all through their lives.  And here is where it dawned on me: our job at Elijah School is to help them with the other three things.  We need to show them how God has blessed them, set them apart, and given them unique capabilities all their own.  They need to know how to use those talents and abilities to live out their own walk with Christ – in other words, how they are taken by God Himself and given to the world, how their very lives are gifts to the rest of us. 

Why us?  Why Elijah School?  Why do we have to do this work?  In case you haven’t guessed, it’s because God put the brokenness of these young people on us; He has taken us from where were in life and set a vision in our hearts; He has given us to the students and their families.  But what about the blessed part?

The simple truth is that we are blessed by God because we get to play a part in His vision, in His school.  We get to lift up the name of Christ daily by ministering to a group of His children who are so often left behind and forgotten.  Elijah is more than a school or a calling: it’s a movement.  A movement that insists we recognize that every life is of infinite value to Father God and we can do no better than to reflect that love to our students. 

And that is the core of what we do: we love these young people.