Dear Academy Family,
With festive gratitude and expectant hearts this Advent Season. May this same Jesus be born in our hearts–
Capital Campaign
Many of you have now seen our capital campaign update video that we released on #GivingTuesday. If not, you can find it here. As we round out the final funding pieces of Midtown and turn our sights to the growing needs as both South and North Campus, we will be inviting you along the way to prayerfully partner with us in bringing these projects online. We are excited about our existing momentum, sensing the leading and love of God along the way, and wanting to provide additional needed world-class facilities for our scholars in the near future. Next Fall’s ribbon-cutting ceremony at Midtown will be a day to revel once again in the providence and provision of God. Stay tuned for our regular Capital updates and invitations to partner throughout 2021.
COVID Prepared to get us to Christmas Break
You’ve already read our pre-Thanksgiving emails, so I will attempt brevity with this reminder. For your patience in the course of a quarantine spike pre-Thanksgiving holidays, we are grateful. Those fourteen days helped us ‘cool off’ as a district. We will apply as careful, firm, and consistent an application of our protocols as ever in these intervening weeks. We can do this! Our goal is to stay in school, deliver our mission, protect our students and faculty, and help students arrive at the end of their year having accomplished their several goals–both academic and spiritual. God’s grace is evident everywhere, from our LiveStream Recitation Days to Nurse Katie’s careful tracking of our student health. All thanks be to Him.
Thanksgiving
Without exaggeration, I can honestly say that The Academy community loomed large in my heart and mind over the week of Thanksgiving. The degree to which you have single-handedly pioneered the richest educational offering that history has made available (Classical & Christian!); and done it in a city where it’s newness makes it a novelty, is a feat and a victory that few probably consider all that often. You have made educational history in this city, and you have done it with gigantic souls for a King whose throne-room is bigger than the sky itself. God’s grace is all over this community.
Advent
It’s that same throne-room that we turn our eyes this Advent season. To some degree, the weather in our little state of Oklahoma is the perfect figurement of Advent – the undressing of the trees, the dormancy of the bermuda grass front yards, the apparent plainness of it all; these are the ‘laid bare’ moments of Advent, so that the ‘undressing’ of our hearts to simplicity, gratitude, worshipfulness, and confession can be decked afresh with the joyous ‘tinsel’ of the Christmas season (Christmas day and the 11 days which follow)!! We clean before we decorate! We scrub the hair of my two little boys before they put on their wedding-party clothes! I wash my car before I take my wife on a date! We scale back to a certain clean, humble, confessional simplicity before we party down the 12 days of Christmas and beyond. O Come, Emmanuel! Ransom captive Israel!
Nate+