The Importance of Well-being
Each year YCS has a school theme that helps shape the focus of the school year, for worship in particular. This year’s theme was:
Keep Calm and Trust God
Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight.
Proverbs 3:5-6.
Resilient well-being was a concept that we wanted, secondarily, to focus on as a school, but when the school year began I didn’t necessarily know what that meant. What is well-being? What is resilience? How do those two things help us in life and help us to trust in God?
With the help of Michael Essenberg, an Christian education consultant and former head of school at CAJ (Christian Academy Japan) and OCSI (Okinawa Christian School International), Ms. Linda and I embarked on helping teachers and staff experience more resilient well-being; well-being in emotional, physical and spiritual realms.
In a school environment that is focusing on the well-being of both teachers and students, it helps to build routines around well-being. Weekly meetings with different members of staff; check-ins on highs/lows and prayer requests; praying together; having well-being goals and checking in on these goals together; moments of genuine connection with people that we work with; celebrating wonderful things; and mourning the sad and difficult have all been ways that the YCS staff have worked together on resilient well-being. These practices have helped me to realize what a supportive and team-oriented community looks like and that the work is never really done.
As new challenges and opportunities arise with the next school year, I hope that as a school we can continue to embrace resilient well-being and care for one another as a habit that has been formed by all that we have learned this year.
Have a wonderful summer everyone!
