By Noel Thomason, SBS Head of School
At this moment, you may be sitting perfectly still. Perhaps you are holding a cup of coffee at the kitchen table, sitting behind a desk, or waiting in the carpool line. Nothing around you seems to be moving much, and yet you are traveling at an astonishing speed. The Earth beneath your feet is spinning. At the equator, its surface moves at more than 1,000 miles per hour. At the same time, this enormous planet is racing around the Sun at approximately 67,000 miles per hour. And our entire solar system, carrying the Earth and everything upon it, is sweeping around the center of the Milky Way at roughly half a million miles per hour.
Yet your coffee remains in the cup. The picture on the wall does not tremble. You feel no wind rushing past your face. You simply sit there, apparently motionless, while being carried through the heavens at a speed almost beyond comprehension. There is something wonderfully humbling about that.
We live every moment of our lives surrounded by realities far greater than our ability to perceive them.
Your heart has been beating while you have been reading these words, yet you have not commanded it to beat even once. Your lungs have drawn oxygen from the air without awaiting your instructions. Light has entered your eyes, been converted into electrical signals, and somehow become images in your mind. Thoughts that existed in another person’s mind have been formed into words, placed upon a page, entered through your eyes, and are now becoming thoughts in yours. We call these things ordinary only because they happen every day, but they are anything but ordinary.
Perhaps one of the great dangers of life is not that wonder disappears, but that we become accustomed to it. We stop seeing.
The Reality Beneath the Visible
Scripture pulls back the curtain even farther. Paul writes of Christ, “He is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17, NIV).
Consider the immensity of that statement. The universe is not merely a great machine wound up long ago and left to run. Creation is held together in Christ. The stars scattered across the night sky, the planets moving silently through their courses, the breath entering our lungs, the child laughing across a dinner table, the changing of seasons, the mysterious firing of neurons within the human brain, all exist within a creation continually upheld by God.
We do not live in an empty universe. We live in our Father’s world. Every sunrise arrives upon His command. Every field and forest bears the fingerprints of its Maker. Every human being we pass in a hallway, sit beside in a classroom, work alongside in an office, or encounter impatiently in traffic bears His image. Creation is continually speaking. “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands” (Psalm 19:1, NIV).
The tragedy is not that God has failed to reveal Himself. The tragedy is that we have become so accustomed to His fingerprints that we scarcely notice them, and I wonder whether the same thing can happen to us spiritually. We can become accustomed to truth. We can learn the vocabulary of Christianity, memorize Scripture, attend church, sing worship songs, pray before meals, participate in Bible studies, and become remarkably skilled at knowing the correct answers.
We can know about God while slowly losing our wonder at God. That possibility should concern every one of us.
Knowing the Answer Is Not the Same as Loving the Truth
There is a particular danger within Christian education because we are very good at teaching information. We should be. Truth matters. Students should know Scripture. They should understand theology. They should learn to reason Biblically about history, literature, science, government, mathematics, art, relationships, and culture.
A Christian school that does not take knowledge seriously has misunderstood both Christianity and education, but there is a difference between possessing truth and being possessed by it. A student can memorize a Bible verse for a test without loving the God who spoke it. An adult can explain forgiveness while quietly nurturing bitterness. We can defend the Biblical definition of love while treating the person in front of us without much of it. We can know that God is sovereign and still be consumed by our desire for control. We can speak eloquently about finding our identity in Christ while depending desperately upon the approval of others.
Information is necessary, but information alone is not transformation. Eventually, Christianity presses beyond the question, What do you know? It asks something far more searching: What do you love?
Jesus repeatedly moves toward this deeper territory. “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:21, NIV).
Notice the direction. Our treasure and our heart are connected. What we value begins to pull on us. Our loves develop gravity, and slowly, sometimes almost imperceptibly, our lives begin orbiting whatever has captured our hearts.
We Are Always Being Pulled by Something
We like to imagine ourselves as creatures of pure reason. We gather facts, carefully consider them, and make rational decisions. Sometimes we do, but often our reasoning is following something deeper. We move toward what we love. We protect what we treasure. We sacrifice for what we value. We fear losing what we have allowed to define us.
This is why our affections matter so profoundly. If approval becomes one of my highest loves, I will eventually arrange parts of my life around the opinions of others. If achievement becomes ultimate, success will make me proud, and failure will devastate me, because something much larger than a grade, promotion, championship, or accomplishment is suddenly at stake. My identity is at stake. If comfort becomes my treasure, inconvenience begins to feel like injustice. If control becomes my security, uncertainty becomes unbearable. If recognition becomes my hunger, another person’s success begins to feel strangely like my loss.
These things are not necessarily evil in themselves. Achievement can be good. Excellence is worthy of pursuit. Relationships are gifts. Comfort can be enjoyed. The approval of wise people can encourage us. The problem begins when a good thing is asked to become an ultimate thing. Then the gift quietly climbs onto the throne, and this is where the language of ordered affections becomes so important. The Christian life is not a life emptied of love. Christianity does not call us to care less, desire less, enjoy less, or become emotionally detached from the world. It calls us to love things in their proper order. To love God supremely so that everything else can finally be loved rightly.
From Ownership to Stewardship
This is why one of the central ideas in a StoneBridge education is the movement from ownership to stewardship. At first, those words may sound like an educational philosophy. They are much more than that. They represent an entirely different way of seeing life.
The world continually teaches us to ask: What do I want? What will make me happy? How can I get ahead? What will people think of me? What belongs to me? The gospel begins somewhere else. “You are not your own; you were bought at a price” (1 Corinthians 6:19–20, NIV).
For the Christian, this changes everything. My intelligence is not merely mine; it is entrusted. My abilities are entrusted. My opportunities are entrusted. My influence is entrusted. My possessions are entrusted. My relationships are entrusted. My time is entrusted. Even the breath currently filling my lungs is a gift I did not create and cannot guarantee will be followed by another.
Stewardship therefore asks a better question than preference. Not simply, What do I want to do with my life? But what has Christ entrusted to me, and how can I faithfully return it to Him?
That question can transform a classroom. It can transform a career. It can transform a marriage. It can transform parenting, leadership, athletics, friendships, money, ambition, disappointment, and success. The Christian life ceases to be an attempt to persuade God to bless the kingdom we are building for ourselves. Instead, we discover the joy of participating in His.
The Quiet Places Where Affections Are Revealed
We often imagine spiritual transformation happening in dramatic moments. Sometimes it does. There are mountaintop experiences. There are moments when Scripture seems almost to leap from the page, when worship overwhelms us, when conviction comes with unmistakable clarity. But most of life is not lived on mountaintops. It is lived on Tuesdays. It is lived in hallways and kitchens, classrooms and offices, carpools and locker rooms. It is lived in conversations no one else hears. It is revealed in the response we give when someone disappoints us. It appears in the text message we decide to send, or wisely choose not to send. It is revealed by what happens inside us when another person receives the recognition we wanted. It emerges when plans change, when someone criticizes us, when a child struggles, when we lose, when we are inconvenienced, or when nobody notices the good thing we quietly did.
These ordinary moments are not interruptions to our spiritual lives. They are often where our spiritual lives are most clearly revealed. They expose what we love. So perhaps we need to learn to ask ourselves better questions: Who am I? Whose am I? What am I seeking right now? What desire is driving this decision? Whose approval am I craving? What am I afraid of losing? Where will this path eventually lead me?
And perhaps beneath all of those questions lies another: What has my heart treasured so deeply that it now has the power to command me?
A Greater Affection
Here we reach both the difficulty and the beauty of the gospel. We cannot simply command ourselves to stop loving. The human heart does not work that way. Try telling yourself not to desire approval. Try ordering yourself not to fear. Try simply deciding that achievement, comfort, control, or recognition no longer matters. The old affection often remains. It must be displaced by something greater. This is what Thomas Chalmers famously described as “the expulsive power of a new affection.” A lesser love loses its mastery when the heart encounters a greater one, and this is where Christianity becomes far more than a system of moral instruction.
“Here we reach both the difficulty and the beauty of the gospel. We cannot simply command ourselves to stop loving. The human heart does not work that way… This is what Thomas Chalmers famously described as “the expulsive power of a new affection.” A lesser love loses its mastery when the heart encounters a greater one, and this is where Christianity becomes far more than a system of moral instruction.”
Jesus Christ does not merely arrive with a better list of rules. He gives us Himself. The One through whom galaxies were made entered the creation He sustains. The One who holds all things together allowed Himself to be held in the arms of Mary. The One who gives breath to humanity walked dusty roads on human feet. The One before whom angels worship knelt and washed the feet of His disciples. The One who knew no sin bore ours. The hands that formed creation were pierced by nails. The heart from which perfect love eternally flowed was broken for rebels, and the grave that received Him could not hold Him.
This is not merely information to be filed into the proper theological category. This is a Person worthy of our affection. When Christ becomes more beautiful to us, something begins to happen to the lesser loves that once ruled us. Their gravitational pull weakens. Obedience becomes more than compliance. Truth becomes more than information. Worship becomes more than obligation. Service becomes more than duty. Sacrifice becomes possible because we have discovered something worth sacrificing for. We do not merely try harder to release our idols. We loosen our grip because our hands have found something better to hold.
Learning to See Again
Perhaps, then, one of the great purposes of Christian education is to teach us to see. To look at mathematics and discover order. To look at history and recognize providence. To look at literature and encounter the longings of the human heart. To look through a microscope and marvel at design. To look through a telescope and feel appropriately small. To look at another human being and remember, before category, disagreement, irritation, usefulness, popularity, ability, or failure, image-bearer. And ultimately, to look at Christ and discover the One in whom all of these scattered pieces finally hold together.
That is our hope at StoneBridge; to produce not merely graduates who know more, though we want them to know much. Not merely students who behave well, though character matters deeply. Not merely young men and women prepared for college and careers, though we want them exceptionally prepared. We are praying for something deeper. We are praying for hearts awakened to the beauty of Christ. We are praying for young men and women whose loves have been ordered so deeply by Him that truth shapes their thinking, goodness directs their choices, and love becomes visible in the way they treat the people God places before them.
That prayer is not only for our students. It is for all of us: parents, teachers, leaders, grandparents, alumni, and friends and supporters of this school. We are all being formed. We are all loving something. We are all building our lives around some treasure. The question is not whether our hearts have affections. The question is whether those affections are rightly ordered.
Perhaps today we should once again look up.
The earth is turning beneath us. The heavens are moving above us. Our hearts are beating within us. Creation is declaring the glory of God all around us, and beneath it all, Christ is holding everything together. May we never become so accustomed to the wonder that we fail to see Him, and may seeing Him cause us to love Him more. Because in the end, we will become more and more like what we truly love.
