Scripture tells us that “we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do” (Ephesians 2:10). Every student bears the image of God and is being prepared by God to do good works. Community is often how God chooses to do some of this preparation. Our children are given strengths, not just to find passions that make their lives easier, but to use them when God calls them to good works in the world. Put another way, our children’s strengths do not decide which tasks they can do. They show how God made them to go about the tasks they are called to.
This goes beyond our students, however, to our whole community. This fall our teachers and staff have engaged with StrengthsFinder. At a recent All-Staff meeting, we shared the top 5 strengths after we all took the StrengthsFinder assessment. When we put the results side by side, some common themes you might expect in educators, such as Belief, Relator, Developer, and Empathy, rose to the top, but our team covered all 34 of Clifton’s strengths. This led us to look at how our combination of individual strengths also changed how we used them. A strength of Belief paired with Futuristic yields someone who consistently draws out greatness in those around them. A strength of Relator combined with a strength of Discipline often is a pacesetter in a collaborative group project. Like our students, our strengths inform how we approach the tasks God calls us to.
As parents and mentors to our children, this applies to us too. Scripture hands each generation the same assignment: “Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up” (Deuteronomy 6:7). Your strengths do not decide whether you are called to that work, only how you go about it. A parent with Responsibility shows up, follows through, and teaches a child that a promise is a promise. That doesn’t mean a parent without this strength is off the hook for showing up. But a parent with Ideation will turn a long car ride or a rainy Saturday into a creativity journey children will remember. That means we get to study and draw out our own children’s unique strengths using our unique strengths as parents.
Through this process, God builds a generational mosaic of image bearers in his world. And as I look at the set of image bearers he has gathered here at Denver Christian, I feel incredibly blessed to be a part of our community, who, in 100 different ways, with as many combinations of strengths, are working together to form children to engage the world with Christ’s transforming power and love.