This week we celebrated Heritage Day. We held an assembly where our Gold and Founding Members were special guests.
It is good to recognise the involvement and commitment of those who poured so much into Calvin Christian School in earlier years. These same people remain involved and many pray consistently for God to bless our school. We are very thankful for this.
Mrs Janet Vanderwal gave an interesting account of her years as a student from when the school first opened. She described the dedication and hard work of her father, Mr OJ Hofman, the founding Principal. His working day usually began around 7.40 am and finished around 11.00 pm, with a short visit home for time with his family.
Mrs Vanderwal entertained us with amusing anecdotes of inky newsletters (Gestetner printed), Saturday sports carnivals, fun in the playground (that had one set of ‘monkey bars’) and daily bottles of warm unpasteurised milk.
We honour Mr Hofman, those early parents who had such godly vision and faith, and the staff who worked without the administrative support and modern technology we have today.
“God has certainly grown and prospered our school.”
When the time capsule was opened on Calvin’s 50th Anniversary in 2012, the Calvin Charter was recovered. This now hangs beautifully framed in the Principal’s office.
It explains the reason the founding members were prepared to sacrifice time, effort and finances into building the School: ‘to train … children through the means of this Christian School through which they will be equipped for real service to God, to church, to nation, to home, to self.’
Below this statement are listed the one hundred names of these founding members. Many of those family names are still familiar to our student community. Today we recognise that many other names, of families from many other cultures, have since been added to our population. God has certainly grown and prospered our school.
Psalm 127:3 tells us that children are a heritage from the Lord. They are a blessing we must nurture academically but also spiritually and emotionally to be salt and light in a world that is becoming increasingly hostile to a Christian worldview.
There is such an irony in this. We must love where hate abounds for ‘love never fails’ (1 Corinthians 13: 8). May God equip us by the Holy Spirit to support parents who remain committed to the vision for Christ-centred education and to show the Father’s heart to a world floundering to make sense of the pain and suffering we have and are still experiencing.
Ineke Laning – Acting Principal