THE JUBILEE SCHOOL Newsletter June 2022
TO SHOW HIMSELF STRONG Parting Words from Kellen Meyer, Dean of Students Almost thirteen months ago I moved back to Moscow after completing a seven-year pilgrimage to California. It was a time of significant transition as I went from training future airline pilots to starting seminary studies. I didn’t have a job lined up, but that wasn’t for lack of applications. I eager to work anywhere while I completed my new course of study, but the multitude of fruitless phone calls and rejected resumes was somewhat discouraging. It is so much easier to intuit God’s providential hand in past events than it is to trust Him for the future. Meanwhile, the Jubilee School had moved from the “Blue House” into the Eastside Marketplace Mall and was growing and multiplying like a zucchini plant on Miracle Grow. It went from a few dozen students in the Fall of 2020, to nearly 100 in the Spring of 2021. Heather, always one for planting more Christian Classical schools in the fertile soil of post-covid-zoom-vacci-mask-culture, needed someone to help her with the day-to-day at Jubilee. And that someone turned out to be me. 2 Chronicles 16:9 says, “For the eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to show Himself strong on behalf of those whose heart is loyal to Him.” Looking back now, I cannot imagine a more fruitful year than the one I have had as the Dean of Students at Jubilee. And to think I might have missed it if I accepted a job somewhere else! This last year God has shown me His faithfulness in meeting Jubilee’s financial needs. I have seen Him working through the teachers and staff to declare His works to the next generation, not to mention the growth that I have experienced as I partnered with parents in the discipline of their children at school. Oh, and the joyful students! They have blessed me with both the light, laughing joy fueled by their thankfulness and energy, and their deep and weighty joy when they turned from sin and sought restoration. But God has not only shown himself strong on my behalf—His power and blessing have been resting heavily upon the school as well, and continue to do so. We are so grateful. Grateful for the volunteer time and resources which the Jubilee parents have donated to their school; grateful for our first graduating class and all the new students (over 130 students and climbing!); grateful for the new facilities that opened up next door so that we can expand. But, as any parent of teenagers knows, rapid growth comes with rampant clumsiness and leg pains. Many trials and adventures loom just a head. And while it is still impossible to know exactly what God will do, we eagerly wait to see how He will show Himself strong. We already have one of the first answers to prayer for next year with Kent Young coming on as the new Headmaster. Heather and I tag teamed the leadership this last year, but neither one of us has had the time to do it all. Why someone with Kent’s educational background and expertise would intentionally move to Moscow to lead a small startup Christian school is inexplicable, except as a clear answer to prayer.
Now that Kent is coming on, I will be stepping away from Jubilee. I will be working as an intern with Valley Covenant Church down in Lewiston as I begin my second year of Greyfriars studies through Christ Church. I am so thankful to be handing off the leadership of Jubilee to a man of Kent’s talents but even more so because he is a compassionate man of God, zealous for Christian education. The fact that Jubilee is also going to have a killer music program is just ranch on the broccoli or glaze on the doughnut! Our God knows where the gold is buried. He meets our every need. “I will sing of the mercies of the Lord forever; With my mouth will I make known Your faithfulness to all generations. For I have said, ‘Mercy shall be built up forever; Your faithfulness You shall establish in the very heavens'" (Ps 89:1-2).
GETTING TO KNOW OUR FACULTY Cynthia Soderberg I'm blessed to be the wife of Gregory, and mom to five wonderful children. At Jubilee I serve as the Director of Individualized Learning. I work with a broad range of delightful students, with needs ranging from simple math help, sensory challenges, reading help, or nonspeaking autism. I absolutely love finding ways to make these children thrive! Education is so much more than the lecture or the book or the rule. I love that at Jubilee we seek to "see the child". What does this child need? How can we best love this young image bearer?
A TIME FOR CELEBRATION Our first graduation and last week of school is a significant milestone and really tells the Jubilee story well. This week, Henry Paxton (for whom Jubilee was started) “spoke” and let his teacher know that he is thankful she has given him a voice. This same week we had our first graduate from high school. This is Jubilee, and we are so thankful that the Lord is using our story to inspire over twenty other schools around the nation to do the same thing.
First Graduate of The Jubilee School, Athanasius Buchan Soderberg
101 Opportunities by Kellen Meyer
To state the obvious: Summer break has just begun. What may be less obvious to the reader is what that means. It means that all students have approximately a quarter of a year off. One fourth of the pie of their year is empty. It comes out to approximately 100 days of nothing to do. That is 144,000 minutes to bingewatch Netflix, sleep-in until noon, and generally wander around aimlessly complaining to their mothers that they are bored. Scratch that last bit. Only a novice at “Summer-breaking” would ever tell his mother he was bored. Actually, every child in the world has probably only done that once. And this is why: mothers by nature are extremely busy and excellent at delegating that business to lethargic 12-year-olds. Students, this brings up an important point that many young people don’t think about. If your mother or father had 100 free days, how would they fill them? Binge watching Netflix? Endlessly surfing Instagram? Watching cat videos on TikTok? As a thought experiment, try to imagine yourself in 10-15 years. Will you still play the piano? Will you receive a scholarship to play college basketball? Will you have a resumé with work experience and multiple references? Will you have narrowed down your desires and talents to know what career path you want to pursue? Will you finally have finished reading everything by Jane Austin? Will you have read through the whole Bible?
PSALM 90:12
SO TEACH US TO NUMBER OUR DAYS THAT WE MAY GET A HEART OF WISDOM Thought experiments like the one above are both important and inevitable. Everyone imagines what he wants to be, or what he could have been. But if you wait until you thirty before you think about this, you will probably be discouraged that you haven’t changed much from when you were thirteen – except perhaps for the fact that you don’t have 100 days off anymore. To quote a wise man, “The soul of a lazy man desires, and has nothing; but the soul of the diligent shall be made rich (Prov 13:4).” In short, if you never begin working toward your goals, you will never attain them. Excellence in anything requires hours of effort. Freedom requires work. You are not free to play hymns on the piano for church or family devotions if you do not first put in the daily plodding work which that skill requires. You cannot read through the Bible in a moment of passion. And you cannot become fluent in French in a week’s time.
So, set yourself a goal—something that you have always wanted to do—and put aside thirty minutes or an hour to that end, or even just ten minutes if that is all you can spare of your 101 Opportunities this Summer. Imagine what you could do. If you are a very slow reader (let’s say it takes you three minutes to read a page) and you read faithfully for your goal of 30 minutes every day, you would get though 10 pages in one day, and 1,000 pages in 100 days. Your diligence would result in having read City of God, Pride and Prejudice, and the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe by the end of the Summer. Besides the obvious bragging points, you will also have subconsciously improved your spelling and vocabulary, and obtained lots of imaginative fodder for writing a book someday — without even trying! If you want to be a blue chip starter on your high school basketball team this coming school year, an hour a day will go a long way to getting you there. Just thirty minutes of study a day is more enough time for you to study for, and take, the private pilot written exam. And even if you did it all: 30 minutes of reading, 30 minutes of aviation study, and an hour of basketball practice, you still would have over 10 hours a day to goof off. In the 1995 BBC television adaption of Pride and Prejudice, the proud, old, Lady Catherine De Bourg says something very insightful: “If I had ever learnt [the piano], I should have been a great proficient.” It is clear from this statement that Catherine De Bourg not only failed to put in the steady labor required to play the piano, but she also cannot see that it is her own laziness which is to blame. In life, the next time you will have as much leisure as you have now, will be when you are old, tired, and retired. Don’t wait until you are the wrinkled De Bourg to turn a profit on the talents God has given to you. The reward of diligence now is a rich and satisfied soul.
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