There's No Place Like Home

This past weekend Heidi and I decided that our children needed to be introduced to one of the classic movies of our time … Wizard of Oz. If you are 40 or older, you can probably still recite parts of the movie and you can remember where you were the first time you saw the movie as a child. As I watched again with my children (whom we were pleasantly impressed, stayed interested for its entirety) I was struck by the main theme of the movie that I of course never picked up on in my younger years: the theme of wanting to go home. If you recall – early in the movie we are drawn into the music of “Somewhere … over the Rainbow”, and we all come along to Oz to see if Dorothy can find this “somewhere”, and see if the scarecrow will be given some brains, and the Tin Man a heart, and to see if the Lion will be allotted some courage . Throughout the movie, we are constantly reminded of the fact that perhaps everything we needed and wanted was really right at home or inside of us, to begin with. In the case of the Wizard of Oz … Oz turns out to be a big fraud anyway … and Dorothy really has everything she wants right at home. “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home.” I believe all of us are fundamentally wired with a sense of “home” and our homecoming. We have a sense of longing and of restless desire to find our home. This theme of longing is very biblical – one could argue that it is one of the central themes of the biblical story. The hope of God’s story is in essence a yearning for the restoration of God’s creation. The Old Testament is packed with stories of God’s people longing to find their way home. From the fall, to Abraham to the Israelites in Egypt, to the desert, to Canaan, back to the desert, into the promised land, desiring to be like other nations who had a King – pleading with God for a King – many of the Kings leading them astray and then coming back to God – going into captivity in Babylon and Assyria – (it’s no secret that some of the most famous and beautiful words were written at that time was when God’s people longed to go home) – building up the temple again and ultimately the coming of Jesus. In his book “Desiring the Kingdom”, James K.A. Smith lays stake to this claim as well. He claims that all of us are longing for “the Kingdom”. “To be human …” says Smith as he quotes St. Augustine “is to be after something, and to be after something is to love something” “love defines us – it is fundamentally a part of our DNA”. According to Smith if we really want to find out about somebody, don’t ask them what they do, but rather ask them what they love – undoubtedly you will get a clearer picture of who this person is. So this is all fine and good – but by now you are asking the “So What?” question – what does this have to do with the school and ACS? The answer is this: At ACS we believe that we are educating with a clear understanding of this premise of desiring and loving. We recognize that for there to be authentic learning happening at our schools – our children have to have a true sense of desiring the Kingdom, and a true sense of loving. How is this evident? It is seen in the everyday things, it is seen in the fact that we don’t just drill information into our children, but we engage them so that they become lovers of the learning. We don’t just educate the heads and the hearts, but we use our hands because we fundamentally understand that our children will only learn when they can practice what they are taught and what they believe. At ACS, we see this idea of “Desiring the Kingdom” resonate in many different ways. Our children are affective, desiring image bearers, who are primed to transform the world – and they will understand that when it’s all said and done … there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home. Julius Siebenga Works Cited: Smith, James K.A. “Desiring the Kingdom”. “The Wizard of Oz”, MGM Studios