- It’s an invitation into a bigger story.
- It’s good to have friends.
Converge is an invitation: an invitation to practice being Faithfully Present and Courageously Good with a body of believers on the same mission. It’s an invitation to collectively celebrate the good work God is up to in the lives of those in our school communities. It’s an invitation for you to actively participate in the bigger story that God is writing in Christian education, a story that transcends nations, accrediting organizations, denominations, school buildings, offices, and classrooms.
You are invited to lend your voice, your talent, your energy, your ideas, your presence, and your courage to this story. Why? Because we need you. Christian education needs you. We want to learn alongside you, grow with you, and learn from you. We need your presence, we need your courage. Our work is not for the faint of heart, and we all need people to accompany us on the journey. So Converge is also an invitation for you to make a friend and be a friend. Your longevity and fulfillment in our purposeful calling will have much to do with the quality of your relationships. You cannot be faithfully present and courageously good alone.
In his book Consolations, David Whyte offers pertinent wisdom and caution to people in our positions: “The dynamic of friendship is almost always underestimated as a constant force in human life. A diminishing circle of friends is the first terrible diagnostic of a life in deep trouble: of overwork, of too much emphasis on a professional identity, of forgetting who will be there when our armored personalities run into the inevitable natural disasters and vulnerabilities found in even the most average existence.”
As new leaders, whether we arrived here by aspiration, willingness to meet a need, or by blindly falling into it, we do not find ourselves lacking best practices, opportunities to grow, or advice to glean (solicited or unsolicited). These keys to leadership, once scarce in Christian education, are everywhere and for most of us are easily accessible. We have many colleagues and mentors who are happy to offer us advice on the nuts and bolts of the profession, action steps needed to implement an initiative, or a new resource for us to explore (and what a gift that is!). What often seems to be elusive, however, are authentic relationships. We need to have and be in wholehearted friendships. We need to be in relationships where we see each other’s fear and pain, empathize with it, and help each other move toward redemption, restoration, imagination, and creative action. We need friends who know that it’s not our work ethic or drive that we are in danger of losing, but that the greatest danger is that we may lose our connection to our hearts and to our Creator.
David Brooks shares in his book How to Know a Person, “A person who feels safe because of the reliable and empathetic presence of others will see the world as wider, more open, and happier place.” Let’s offer that to each other. Let’s offer what author Shauna Niequist suggests: “Honesty, Connection, Grace.” Let’s be faithfully present, courageously good, together.
I hope you respond to the invitation. I hope that I get the opportunity to meet you at Converge. That way together, we can offer authenticity to each other. We can embrace an abundance mindset. We can be on the lookout for moments when we can be curious, offer encouragement, and hear from a different point of view. We can give the Holy Spirit room to move and surprise us. And in that pursuit, there is little doubt we will learn and grow along the way. After all, as our friend—Bob Goff—recently posted on X, “The people who have taught me the most didn’t think they were my teachers; they just thought they were my friends.” It’s good to have friends.
I’ll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from David Whyte: “The ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self, the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.”
See you in Florida!
