• January 26 – February 1 – National Lutheran Schools Week
• January 29 – Concordia Academy attending the March for Life in Topeka
• February 1 – Concordia Academy Chess Invitational
• February 3 – Open Enrollment begins
• February 21 – Student production of Hamlet

“Where there is no vision, the people perish…”
– Proverbs 29:18

from the Desk of Headmaster Dan Snyder

Have you ever wondered who decides what everyone is concerned about from year to year, or perhaps week to week and even day to day in the public square?  Having just come through a political season, some of us may be experiencing whiplash as certain ideas are instantly out of style, a different set of assumed notions become the important ones, and what one may say in polite circles rotates into a new spectrum.  Who is calling the dance? 

The myth of public understanding is the basis for knowing when we are right, or what we must champion. At Concordia Academy these next few weeks, we are diving into the Aeneid, Virgil’s epic poem that serves as an argument for Rome’s right to exercise imperial control over the known world. This came in the aftermath of a series of bloody revolutions and civil war. Men who could remember the older myths of Rome and its republic died and soon it became not only impolite to mention the defeated opposition to the ruling Emperors, it became dangerous and fatal. We have come through similar times, being told whom to praise and whom to curse. 

Importantly, this happens over and over in public life, and we might think that public myths are therefore a nuisance! This cannot be so: there must always be a myth.  Myths explain our lives, they don’t merely describe, they are the ‘why’ and not the ‘what’. We study the things we do and occupy our time the way we do because of a purpose we have silently agreed to. This purpose is a vision, and people being like sheep, as our Savior says, we share a vision. Another word for a vision, and one that comes from outside our own conversation and comes over us is prophecy.

Myths, then, are prophetic, we live toward them. The great fulfillment of the prophetic purpose in the sight of all people, however, is Christ, among us and for us, interceding for us and explaining, as on the road to Emmaus, the ‘why’s’ of all our ‘what’s’. We study the justifications of mankind when we study the endless series of man’s explanations, all the while knowing the completed explanation, as if we had the answers to the exercises before the test. Knowing this, do we live accordingly? This is a question we ask at Concordia Academy, Wichita. Does your student lack a vision, or is there perhaps a worldly myth blocking out the Son, casting life in a confusing shadow?  Education can lift us or baffle us; it depends on the worth of the myth.