Insights

Happy New Year! We are excited to see your kiddos next week and begin the journey through a new semester. It is our prayer that the break offered to you and your family was exactly what was needed at this moment in your lives and that as you begin 2022, it is well. Before leaving school for the Christmas break, teachers were given a t-shirt displaying the phrases, “It is well. I am well. We are well.” The phrase it is well was made popular by a hymn written in 1873 by Horatio Spafford. In the popular hymn It is Well With My Soul, Spafford declares, “It is well.” For those unfamiliar with the tragedy from which the great hymn was born, please take a moment to read the story here https://www.godtube.com/popular-hymns/it-is-well-with-my-soul/. In the hymn, Spafford identifies his condition based on the condition of his soul. 

(Refrain)

It is well with my soul,

It is well, it is well with my soul.

As we begin 2022, many of us will set intentions for the year. A common Logos Prep tradition has been to choose a word for the year. We do this as a school for the school year and many of us do it individually for the New Year as well. If this practice is foreign to you, Jon Gordon’s book, One Word that Will Change Your Life, is a quick, easy read that explains the value of choosing a word of focus. Though we support and even encourage this practice, as we begin this new year, I want to challenge each of you to evaluate the condition of your soul. Is it well? Can each member of your family say it is well? What factors make our soul well? Spafford tells us in his hymn:

That Christ hath regarded my helpless estate,

And hath shed His own blood for my soul.

My sin—oh, the bliss of this glorious thought!

My sin, not in part but the whole,

Is nailed to the cross, and I bear it no more,

Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul!

We can only know it is well when we have allowed the soul healing work of Christ into our lives. Once we have done so, we must make a conscious decision not to live in the emotion of the temporary but in the hope of our secured eternity and the truth of a soul made well. 

For me, be it Christ, be it Christ hence to live:

If Jordan above me shall roll,

No pang shall be mine, for in death as in life

Thou wilt whisper Thy peace to my soul.

But, Lord, ’tis for Thee, for Thy coming we wait,

Spafford goes on to say that his ultimate goal is the sky not the grave. In other words, in the midst of great pain and suffering, his focus was on his eternal condition. 

The sky, not the grave, is our goal;

Oh, trump of the angel! Oh, voice of the Lord!

Blessed hope, blessed rest of my soul!

And Lord, haste the day when the faith shall be sight,

The clouds be rolled back as a scroll;

The trump shall resound, and the Lord shall descend,

Even so, it is well with my soul.

May it be well for each of you in 2022 and beyond. Let us begin 2022 well as we prepare to end the 2021-22 school year well. 

Tammy McIlvoy
Head of School
Logos Preparatory Academy