A Thing of Beauty

We have just had a very exciting week at Step! We had the opportunity to interact with roughly 670 students from 2 different schools in 3 different year groups for a day! It really was a thing of beauty! The most beautiful thing about the week was being able to witness all the special moments where the pupils responded enthusiastically to the message that we were delivering. Whether that was through deep conversations in the year 10 pottery sessions, poignant questions about ethics from the year 12s or the gasp of delight that the year 7s gave after the magic trick at the end of the day. This is what the week of opportunity is all about.

We had a theme for each year group - for the Year 12s at Beaumont it was Ethics, for the Year 7s at St George’s it was Identity and Justice, and with the year 10s at Beaumont we looked at the Christian worldview. What I noticed is that for all the schools we were encouraging them to look at who they are and how they have power to impact the world for good.

Often the world looks at the younger generation in a negative way but I think if they were able to hear and act on the message from these Step Days they could be the most amazing generation yet. Knowing who they are in Christ and knowing that they have been created lovingly for a purpose could make them unstoppable. What I love about working for Step is that we get to tell these young people a different story about themselves, about life and about what’s possible. Perhaps a story that they haven’t heard before and to have a whole week full of these opportunities was a privilege and a joy.

All of this would not be possible without our amazing team of volunteers and staff. We needed about 62 of us in total to run these 5 days which is immense! Some of our volunteers served on multiple days. So, thank you to all of you who poured your time, effort and prayers into these days to make the week such a success. So many seeds were sown and I am sure that they will bear fruit.

I’m going to leave you with a quote that we were given by St George’s School to help us prepare for our Step Days. It was written by the 2nd head teacher at St George’s and is still the cornerstone of their schools mission. I thought it was very interesting and summed up our vision for the days very well:

“A school does not exist to send out men and women solely to play a part in life whereby they achieve a competent and honourable life of useful work, but it exists to send out for posterity and for their own generation, men and women who, by their character shall leave the society in which they live, the better for their presence and hence the world much nearer the Kingdom”.