High School Campus Blog
The Gift of Life
December 10, 2025
I’m reminded again this year what a blessing and joy it is to be in a place where we can openly declare and boldly celebrate the significance of Christmas—that Jesus set aside His rightful glory and power to become a human so God could redeem all humankind through Him!
It was necessary for Jesus to be born as a baby so that He could live a perfect life, from His birth to His death, without fault. He lived as an infant, a toddler, a child, a teenager, and an adult with perfection so that He could take that perfection to the cross and die a death He never deserved, exchanging His perfect life for our sin.
Because of Jesus’ sacrifice, we are gifted Christ’s righteousness—making it as if we had lived perfect lives— when we put our faith in Him! This awe-inspiring truth should cause us to pause and reflect this Advent season on the unfathomable love of God, demonstrated for us in Jesus Christ.
This Christmas, as you reflect on what it means to be CALLED for a Purpose, remember whose power lives in you. JESUS, who perfectly knew His CALLING and PURPOSE, gives us new life and purpose too. Merry Christmas!
Here are the fun events coming up at the JH/HS during Christmas Spirit Week:
Called to be Rooted and Established
December 03, 2025
Each December, we all hear the familiar saying, “Jesus is the reason for the season.” If I’m honest, I’ve said it more often as a platitude rather than as a genuine reminder that there is a deeper meaning to the Christmas season. It wasn’t until I had kids of my own that the beauty of the incarnation started to take root. One night, while rocking my infant daughter to sleep in the light of the Christmas tree, I was struck by her tenderness and vulnerability. Picturing our Savior in that same state drove home for me the outrageously sweet gift that is the incarnation of Christ. The Almighty Creator of heaven and earth, the Great I Am—God, through Jesus Christ, took on the weakness and frailty of humanity. His arrival, a startling act of love, was His response to our sin, pain, and suffering.
Our theme for December, coming from Ephesians 3:17–19 (NIV), is Called to be Rooted and Established. Within those verses, Paul writes, “And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.”
The love of Christ was demonstrated by His willingness not only to be born into fragile humanity, but also to live a life in perfect obedience. He took on the punishment that we deserved. He conquered the powers of sin and death. This love does, indeed, “surpass knowledge,” and yet we can know and experience it through the gift of grace. How would our homes, workplaces, and communities be transformed if we moved into this month living truly rooted and established in that awesome and powerful love of Christ? Is there anything better for us to be “rooted and established” in?
As His followers, our celebration of Christmas is not the abstract celebration of a birth—it is the celebration of the reality of God’s love. He heard the cries and desperation of His people in need; He responded in an unbelievable act of self-sacrificing love; and, moreover, He will return one day and bring us home to heaven with Him.
May you be in awe of the truth of God’s Word, of His amazing love, and His saving grace. May that love extend into your home, office, school, and community as you share the good news. May you be ever more rooted and established in the broad, high, and deep love of Christ.
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Come, thou fount of every blessing; Tune my heart to sing thy grace.
November 19, 2025
The music department has been overflowing with blessings this fall as we have been focusing on tuning our hearts to proclaim God’s grace. Tuning an instrument before a performance is important. If you had the best musician in the world perform on an instrument that was out of tune, they could play all of the right notes, and it would still sound bad. Take Billy Joel on an untuned piano or Yo-Yo Ma on an untuned cello: No amount of expertise and technique can make an out-of-tune instrument sound good. Likewise, as Christ followers, we can try to do all of the right things with our lives, but if our hearts are not “tuned” to the Lord, our work is meaningless. As we have been preparing students to perform music that honors the Lord, we have been striving to do so with hearts that are attuned to Him.
Band, choir, and worship students have had many opportunities to collaborate with each other and perform for our community this fall. Students across many classes and grades performed at our second annual Fall Fest: Music and Mingle. Members of the symphonic band provided prelude music for the National Honors Society Induction Ceremony, and both the band and choir performed musical tributes at the Veterans Day assembly. The jazz band, Shades of Blue, and the worship team filled the Night of Generosity with music from start to finish. The music department has also been able to utilize the new WIN (What’s Important Now) time this year to provide sectionals, lessons, and combined rehearsals that otherwise would not have been possible between different classes.
As our fall events wrap up, we look forward to Christmas. No other holiday is as closely tied to music as Christmas is. Whether it’s the sound and feeling of sleigh bells or the act of singing carols together, Christmas and music go hand in hand. As we prepare to musically celebrate our Savior’s birth, we can easily get wrapped up in the busyness of the season. Rather than relying on our own strength to cut through the noise, we can be reminded that, as the hymn says, His streams of mercy are never ceasing; and that calls “for songs of loudest praise.”
We hope that our upcoming performances will be a special gift for you and your families this Christmas. We invite you to join us at our concerts! We will have two choir concerts on Tuesday, December 9—one at 6:00 p.m. and one at 7:30 p.m. Our band concert will be on Thursday, December 11, at 7:00 p.m. Both concerts will take place in the JH/HS Forum Deo Gloria (PAC). The orchestra will be combining forces with the elementary students to perform several concerts in the community on Friday, December 12, culminating in a 2:15 p.m. concert in Center Court at South Hill Mall. Please join us as we celebrate the season through music!
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Director's Notes — You Can't Take It With You
November 12, 2025
As I write this, I am sitting in the Forum Deo Gloria PAC looking at an unpainted set that was lovingly built by many parents, students, and staff over the weekend. Our Production Workshop class and the cast will be painting it, bringing color and pattern to its bare, rough walls. As the week progresses, student actors will continue to rehearse and bring to life comedic characters written in the 1930s. Next week we will add lights, sound cues, microphones, and costumes. The following week, November 20–22, we will add the final element, the audience, who will experience the story for the first time and hopefully come to love its quirky characters and uplifting message as much as we have through this process.
This massive collaborative art form, theatre, brings together people from all walks of life. Among others, we need individuals skilled in construction who understand how pieces of raw material can come together to form a whole; visual artists who use their imaginations to envision another place and time and use their talent to transport audiences there; and actors who use their instruments of voice, physicality, and expression to embody another person’s experience and explore how humans interact with each other in times of conflict and moments of connection.
This whole process recalls the letter Paul wrote to the church at Ephesus (and likely other churches) in the first century. In Ephesians 1:10 Paul explains God’s purpose is to bring all things in heaven and earth together in Christ. As the letter goes on, he explores the multifaceted wisdom of God in choosing to do this through the story of the people of Israel, which culminates in Israel’s Messiah, Jesus. Through Him, God brought the gentiles into His chosen family. Now that blessing can extend to all humanity! Paul also describes powers, both physical and unseen, that separate and divide. He contrasts these divisive powers with God’s purpose to unify all things in Christ.
The story of the Bible, and a central theme in Ephesians, is about God bringing two different families together. How interesting that this could also describe the basic plot of our play! Moreover, putting on a play is a big project that brings together people with diverse backgrounds and abilities. God’s big project to heal the cosmos in Jesus unites people from different ethnic, religious, and socio-economic backgrounds into the one eternal family of our Creator. He planned before time how we would show His wisdom to the cosmic powers as we, His followers, grow together into a dwelling fit for His Spirit. We live out His calling as we represent Jesus to this hurting world, bringing healing and unity wherever we find brokenness.
Maybe this play appears to be just a sweet, little, old-fashioned comedy—but, in God’s wisdom, maybe the servant-hearted community that brought this project together and the unity our story points to as an ideal could really represent a tiny working model of new creation.
