Grand Rapids Christian Middle School Principal's Corner

The Impact of Small Choices and Actions

We are off to a great start this school year at GRCMS!  We are blessed and honored to be partnering with your family in the lives of your children as they learn and grow this year.  Thanks for sharing them with us!

As we have begun to unpack our school theme, "Dream Small: Do Small Things With Great Love," we have focused with the students on all of the little deeds and words and kindnesses that they can be thinking about and carrying out in each day.  We want them to see how those small words and actions add up to great things for the Kingdom and for the kind of community that we create at school or in our families.

In chapel last Friday, we looked at our theme verse: "Love from the center of who you are; don’t fake it. Run for dear life from evil; hold on for dear life to good. Be good friends who love deeply; practice playing second fiddle" (Romans 12: 9-10, The Message).   We thought about the "center of who we are" as who God made us to be and where our love flows out.

In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis shares this insight about the impact of the seemingly small choices we make each day: “People often think of Christian morality as a kind of bargain in which God says, ‘If you keep a lot of rules I’ll reward you, and if you don’t I’ll do the other thing.’ I do not think that is the best way of looking at it.  I would much rather say that every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow-creatures, and with itself…Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other.” 

Little decisions to show kindness. To forgive. To stand up for what is right. The more we make choices that are God-honoring, the more we are becoming who He wants us to be.

Of course, our lives are not a straight line up or down. We struggle with sin, and we don't always make the choices that we should. But as God is sanctifying us each and every day through the work of the Holy Spirit, it is our hope and prayer that we will be doing small things with great love and holding one another accountable to being Kingdom-builders and effective servants of Jesus Christ.

—Eric Burgess