The Wonder of God’s Creation

I am not sure about you, but I had a great holiday break. One of the things I love to do outside of school when I have holidays is spend time out in nature – looking at sunsets, the sea, our garden with Dahlias all flowering, tall trees and God’s beauty. I think one of the reasons I like it so much is that I can see God’s creation – his handiwork and the amazing patterns, colours and textures in it. It’s the paradox of simplicity and complexity all at once. If I think of the amazing sunsets we saw just before Christmas (such as the one pictured above) – colours of orange, pink blue and purple spread across the sky. It’s as if God had a palette knife and smeared it across in front of me. Then there’s the sea and the crinkles of waves and beach sand, as well as the pictures of saucepans and kites in the stars lighting up the sky for Australia Day.

My family have a small hobby farm and we currently have a paddock filled with sunflowers which have grown without any water and flowered throughout this heatwave. Not much else has grown very well in the heat and the wind but these happy smiling faces have greeted us for weeks now, Each day the flowers turn towards the sun and when I look in the middle of them, I see seeds all perfectly positioned in the amazing mathematical Fibonacci sequence! All of these things are simple things – colours, patterns and pictures we see in other places everyday – yet how they form on this scale in nature so regularly is so complex that it has to be the work of God – surely!

… And then we come back to school and we are so blessed to see the same amazing complexity and simplicity in each child who comes through the gate. Children have some characteristics that are generally the same. Most greet you with a smile each morning, laugh when someone says a joke, test out boundaries, would say that recess and lunch are the best part of the day, are kind, generally try to do their best and can tell when someone genuinely cares about them. Conversely though, each child is so different. They have different ways of learning, different interests and friends, different things that challenge them, and even different ways they interact depending on the day … And that can be true – even for identical twins! So simple and yet so complex.

One of the things I love about Faith, and all of the Lutheran Schools I have worked in, is that we can celebrate these similarities and differences – this simplicity and complexity in nature – whether it be in the things we are learning about, in our children, or in each other. Our philosophy and ‘View of a Child’ states that we see each child as a gift of God, part of nature and God’s wonderful creation, as capable and competent, unique and special, simple and complex. We believe that God has made each child to be just the way they are, and that they are loved by God, and then our role is to nurture them and help them to grow.

Likewise at Faith, we believe that each of our staff members are competent and capable, unique and special, called by God to be here at this time. There are some things about us that are quite simple (such as our love for good food) but then we all have different life stories and experiences that are so complex yet give us richness and diversity.

If we see the beauty of nature and God’s handiwork in all of our staff and our students, our interactions and everything we say and do will reflect respect, kindness, care, and a desire to work and grow together. This is the culture we want and in fact expect here at Faith. This year our Whole College theme is GRACE – unconditional love, not earnt but freely given. With this view of our children and staff, we want to work together showing grace, forgiveness and acceptance, even when things go wrong .

My prayer is for our community to see each other in this way – to value the simplicity and complexity in each other and to see God’s creative hand and craftsmanship in all of nature around us. May we work together to see the colours, shapes and patterns our whole world is created of and want to learn more about them. We are truly blessed to be here - and we are in for an exciting year!