During a drive back from a recent middle school football game I was asked why I left public education for Christian education. My answer focused on one memory from a long road lined with impactful moments.

It was a day of no particular import. One filled with the busyness and mundane challenges of public school administration. In my office was a young man who I knew well. He was a frequent visitor as he often found trouble. This day was no different as I was about to once again call his dad, with whom I was on a first name basis, to ask him to come pick up his son. I was suspending him for the…I don’t remember….time. In that moment I was hit by the realization that I was in a battle unarmed.

I loved my job. I loved the kids I served. Like many of my colleagues, I was compelled by the generational impact that education affords you. It is that impact that motivates us as educators to do what we do. The hope-filled chance to change the trajectory of a young person’s life or to lift them up so that they can grasp at their dreams. Those are the moments we live for as educators. To be the right vessel in the perfect moment to provide exactly what a child, the next generation, needs. That day in my office with that young man was not one of those moments…but it could have been.

You see, what that young man needed was not more discipline. While the consequence was deserved, and even appropriate, it didn’t have the effect that was desired: a changed heart. No amount of discipline can truly bring that about. That kind of transformation only comes through the power of the Gospel. What that young man needed was for me to share with him the hope found in Jesus. To open up the Word and read to him about the love the Father has for him. To share with him my story of redemption. To pray with him. To lay my hands on him in prayer and ask the Holy Spirit to bring life to his hardened heart. That day he received none of that because I wasn’t allowed to do so.

I came back to Christian education because it is there that I am able to give students what they truly need. It is there that I am able to genuinely transform the next generation. It is there that I can enter the battle armed. Armed with the hope, truth and love of the Gospel.

I think of that young man and how that day in my office at a public school in California would have looked different at Front Range Christian School. How those days do look different here. Christian Education is worth it, because it is the only education empowered to genuinely meet the needs of the children we serve.

That young man’s name is written inside the back cover of my bible. He gets prayed for often in my office here at Front Range Christian School. I lift him up by name longing to have that moment back; wishing I could have shared with him what he really needed.