Friday Focus

Operation Christmas Child concludes this week.

Christmas Shoeboxes Due

This month our school is taking part in Operation Christmas Child. Last year over 5 million hurting children experienced the joy of Christmas as gift-filled shoe boxes were distributed in 94 countries affected by war, poverty, disease, and disaster. This was made possible by thousands of individuals, churches, and groups that prepared, collected, and processed shoe boxes.

This year our school will once again be a part of this worldwide project. Our community will collect over 200 shoe boxes.

All of our shoeboxes are to be returned to school by next Friday, November 17. We will take them to a nearby collection center.

There may be other families in your local church who may ask your child to return shoeboxes to school. Thanks for helping them out!

I appreciate your help with this project as we work together to share the true message of Christmas with children around the world.

These boxes will reach children and families around the world with the Good News of Jesus Christ. Countless lives will be changed as a result of our generosity.

May God bless you!

More About Operation Christmas Child...

Thanksgiving Vacation

Our school will be closed November 20-24 for Thanksgiving Vacation.

Extended care is available on Monday and Tuesday (November 21 and 22) from 7:30 am to 6:00 pm. There is no cost for those enrolled in the monthly after-school care program. The cost is $15 per day for all others.

I Owe You the Truth

"Am I under oath here?" could become the mantra of our time. What a shame that would be! In everyday personal and family, business and professional life, there is no more critical need than to remember just how important truth-telling is for all of life – not just when under oath in a courtroom.

Robert Feldman, a psychologist at the University of Massachusetts, ran an experiment which appears to show that people have become so good at lying that they sometimes don't even know they are doing it. He videotaped 121 pairs of students who'd just met. After a ten-minute conversation, each student was shown his or her tape and asked to point out any misrepresentations.

In their initial post-conversation interviews, most of the students were quite sure they had spoken truthfully. But when forced to review the videotape, fully sixty percent realized they had lied at least once. On average, most had lied two or three times in the ten-minute exchange with a stranger.

In case you're interested in this detail, the males most often lied to puff themselves up. Females, on the other hand, most often fudged the truth to claim more for others or to take the sharp edges off negative opinions of others.

Scandals in government, business, and church remind us how much harm can be done by falsehood, cooking the books, and silence in the face of wrongdoing, oppression, or discrimination. But Dr. Feldman's research reminds us that truth-telling in the ordinary routines of daily life is a challenge to every single one of us.

"He who permits himself to tell a lie once finds it much easier to do it a second and a third time," said one of the founding fathers of our country, "till at length it becomes habitual."

Beyond simply clucking our tongues at the big-scale dishonesty of a few, the clear personal challenge here is to discipline ourselves to make truthfulness a way of life. We also must work at creating an open and accepting community that makes it much easier to be honest and authentic. Then honesty becomes habitual. With practice at speaking truthfully in life's little things, we become trustworthy people whose word is our bond. Why not resolve to monitor your own truth-telling quotient carefully this week?

In family, corporation, society, or church, no one has the right to withhold information to which another is entitled. Trust makes community possible and is the first casualty of a lie. "What this adds up to, then, is this: no more lies, no more pretense. Tell your neighbor the truth. In Christ's body we're all connected to each other, after all. When you lie to others, you end up lying to yourself" Ephesians 4:25 (Mes).

--Rubel Shelly