From your South Campus Principal, Grant Bickell
One of my favorite movies growing up was Remember the Titans. For that matter it is still one of my favorite movies today. The amount of angst boiling up inside the characters and the ability to overcome years of hostility over a sport won me over. Among many, there are two particular scenes I have always loved.
First, when Coach Boone eats a grape off a spoon. There is no redeeming value to this scene. It just always struck me as funny and I still laugh at and look forward to this scene today.
*eats grape* “Trick plays?”
The second scene hopefully makes a little more sense. I played football from fourth grade through high school and even had a chance to play in college. The team meeting scene where the Titans finally decide to put their differences aside and play football together has got to be one of my favorite scenes of all time. I always dreamed of having a moment like this for the teams I played on. No, we weren’t segretated in any way but we always had our differences. I loved this scene because they connect not only physically and emotionally but they connect spiritually. You may well remember, Louie and Rev begin singing Isaiah 40 together:
Even youths grow tired and weary,
and young men stumble and fall;
but those who hope in the Lord
will renew their strength.
They will soar on wings like eagles;
they will run and not grow weary,
they will walk and not be faint.
Isaiah 40:30-31, NIV
Hope. After the year and a half we have had, can we all agree that we need to grow in the virtue of hope? Hope for a future. Hope for the end of a virus. Hope in our leaders. We long to see ourselves and others grow in hope. But, what is it? Dr. Timothy Dernlan says, “Hope is more than a wish. Hope is the convergence of a lifetime of knowledge and experiences that produce a foundation of confidence on which a person can stand.” In Dr. Dernlan’s book, Classical Christian Virtues, he pits the two extremes of hope against one another to show the need for balance. We see absence of hope produce hopelessness and the abundance of hope produce naivety.
Friends, as we look forward to our year of rising up and welcoming back the culture we know and love, let us have hope. Hope that God is on His throne and that He is still in control. To end today, I will leave you with an excerpt from Peter Kreeft’s book, Fundamentals of the Faith: Essays in Christian Apologetics,
“The concept of hope has been hopelessly trivialized by the modern mind, just as the concept of faith has. Just as I believe usually means merely I feel, so I hope usually means only I wish or wouldn’t it be nice if…. But Christian hope, the theological virtue of hope, is not a wish or a feeling; it is a rock-solid certainty, a guarantee, an anchor. We bury our dead in the sure and certain hope of the resurrection. Feelings are subject to every wind of chance and change, from politics to digestion. But Christian hope has a foundation. It is a house built upon a rock, and that rock is Christ. The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight, we sing to the little town of Bethlehem, the house of bread from which our souls are fed.”
Please check our most update to date calendar at https://theacademyok.org/event-calendar-widget/
August 20 – House Leaders Meeting Monthly meetings to prepare our house leaders to lead the next months house lessons.
August 20 – Dialectic Cross Country Spirit Day
August 23 – Chapel. Formal Day.
August 25 – Bake Sale – Ambrose House. Moved to September 1
August 31 – Chapel. Formal Day.
September 1 – Bake Sale – Ambrose House.
September 1 – Spirit Day. House Meetings. Students may wear house shirts or Academy shirts with normal uniform bottoms, PE bottoms, and sneakers.
September 1 – Fire Drill/Tornado Drill. Fire drill morning, tornado afternoon.
September 6 – LABOR DAY – NO SCHOOL.
September 10 – Night to Unite – Dialectic and Rhetoric night off campus
September 13 – Staff Meeting after school
September 14 – Chapel. Formal Day.
September 15 – Blended Encouragement 8:15-9:15.Parent event in the chapel downstairs. A time for blended parents to share struggles, successes, and tips.
September 15 – Bake Sale – Benedict House.
September 17- Jerome House Feast. Noon-1:00 in the Chapel. In addition to our all-school Christmas and Resurrection Feasts, each house has a feast throughout the year on a Friday during lunch (these Fridays are selected as the closest Friday to that Saint’s actual Feast Day).
September 17 – Dialectic Cross Country Spirit Day
September 20 – Chapel. Formal Day.
September 20 – Sixth Grade Check-in. Similar to the Blended Encouragement time, it is a time for these new-to-dialectic parents to get together.
September 22 – View Event 9:00. View Events are the monthly tours we offer to anyone who is interested in learning more about the school.
September 27 – Individual School Portraits. Formal Uniforms.
September 28 – Chapel. Formal Day.
