High School Blog

As I begin my first year as superintendent of Cascade Christian Schools, I want to say how grateful Sheila and I are for the extraordinary hospitality you have extended to us. From our first days here, we have felt genuinely welcomed into the Cascade Christian community. Thank you.

As I have begun learning our schools, one thing has struck me:

Schools measure things.

Grades. Test scores. Attendance. Goals. Wins and losses. College acceptances. Enrollment. Growth.

Measurement is useful. It tells us where we are and where we need to grow. But there is something no report card, scoreboard, résumé, or ranking can measure: the worth of a person.

That distinction matters because we live in a world constantly inviting us to confuse the two.

A student gets an A and begins to think, I am the smart one.

A student gets cut from the team and wonders, Maybe I’m not enough.

Someone gets noticed. Someone gets overlooked. Someone succeeds. Someone fails.

Slowly, what happened to us can begin telling us who we are.

And adults are not immune. We can measure ourselves by our children’s success, our careers, our reputation, our productivity, or whether life seems to be going according to plan.

The gospel interrupts all of that.

Christianity does not tell us to become impressive enough that God finally approves of us. Nor does it tell us simply to look within ourselves and discover how wonderful we already are.

It tells us something far better.

We were created in God’s image, which gives every human being a dignity that achievement cannot increase and that failure cannot erase. Yet we also turned away from the God who made us. We could not repair that distance by performing better.

So Christ came to us.

He lived the life we could not live, carried our guilt at the cross, rose from the grave, and joins those who trust him to himself. In Christ, we are forgiven, welcomed, and given a new identity.

That means we do not work our way toward acceptance; we begin from acceptance. And that changes the way we approach school.

We can pursue academic excellence without making grades our identity. We can compete fiercely without believing the scoreboard determines our worth. We can correct a student without reducing that student to his or her worst decision. We can admit when we are wrong without being crushed by it. And we can celebrate someone else’s success because their success does not diminish us.

At Cascade Christian Schools, we should pursue excellence. We should expect students to work hard, develop their gifts, take responsibility, and grow in character.

But excellence makes a wonderful offering and a terrible god.

My hope is that Cascade Christian will be the kind of place where students are challenged because they matter—not challenged in order to prove that they matter. There is an enormous difference.

Grades can measure learning.

A stopwatch can measure speed.

A scoreboard can record the winner.

An algorithm can rank performance.

But none of them gets the final word about a human being.

That word belongs to Christ.

When our identity is secure in him, we are free to learn, risk, fail, grow, serve, create, compete, apologize, forgive, and try again—not to manufacture a life worth loving but because in Christ, we are already deeply and securely his.

That is the kind of freedom I hope always marks Cascade Christian Schools.

As Sheila and I begin this first year with you, we thank you again for welcoming us so generously. I am deeply grateful to be part of this community and excited for what God will do among us in the year ahead.