There’s no Better Season for Gratefulness

A Message of Thanksgiving from Head of School Jon McGee

 

Thanks are the highest form of thought, and gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.
GK Chesterton

For me, every hour is grace. And I feel gratitude in my heart each time I can meet someone and look at his or her smile.
Elie Wiesel

Dear Prep Community,

Happy Thanksgiving!

Time seems to move much more quickly between Thanksgiving and Christmas as the semester winds to its end, we race to holiday gatherings, we search for “just the right gift,” and we prepare for the joys of Christmas day. A year of activity in just one month.

But more than feast and frenzy, Thanksgiving and the Advent season that will begin on Sunday provide us with an opportunity to reflect on gratitude. While gratefulness is hardly confined to a single time of year, there is no better season to move it front and center than during this joyous season.

We have much to be thankful for at Saint John’s Prep. I am grateful for our students and the curiosity, joy, and energy they bring to school each day. In our classrooms and hallways, on our playing fields and our performing stages, we get a glimpse of the future and a sense of wonder and awe of all that can be. Our students inspire me every day.

I’m thankful as well for our talented faculty and staff who teach and guide our students in so many different ways inside and outside of the classroom. They combine their professional gifts with an abiding sense of care for the young women and men they instruct and mentor each day. They shape and transform lives.

Finally, I’m thankful for the parents, family, alumni, and friends who support our students and the school. I am grateful for the trust they have placed in us to guide and form our students. We are a community defined less by geography or proximity than by a belief grounded in love that our work as parents and mentors will yield fruit in a better world.

As we prepare for this season of light, I offer this prayer to our community:

Creator God,
Thank you for the gifts of creation and community, woods and water, friendship and fellowship
As we prepare for Thanksgiving and begin the Advent season, we pray
For faith in a world where many walk in fear; may all be healed
For food in world where many walk in hunger; may all be fed
For light in world that knows too much darkness; may all find peace
For family in a world where many walk alone; may all be loved
Amen

Blessings for a wonderful Thanksgiving and Advent!

Jon McGee

Head of School

Saint John’s Preparatory School