Apple Corporation started in the garage of Steve Jobs’ parents in Los Altos, California in 1976. Jobs and his friends Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne paid their way by picking apples during the day and working on the design of their first computer by night. Wozniak asked Jobs, “What will we name our company?” After some thought, Jobs, who was munching on an apple he had just picked, said, “Let’s call it ‘Apple’.” In 1984 when they produced their first personal computer, the apple orchards again lent a name, “Macintosh.” Earlier, Wayne, who despaired of the fledgling company surviving, sold his share to Jobs and Wozniak for $800. In 2015 Apple became the first American company to be valued at $700 billion.

The same “started in a garage” story marked the birth of other well-known giants: Disney, Amazon, Google, Harley-Davidson, Hewlett-Packard, and Mattel.

So what’s the point?

Everything big starts out with a simple idea—a computer, a children’s black & white movie, a motor for a bicycle, an online bookstore. And every small idea needs someone to see it through to maturity—not to bail out like Wayne did with Apple.

That’s how your school started out. Someone had an idea growing from a spiritual unction. That spark of an idea was shared with other people and soon it became a conversation, then a matter for prayer, then a plan, and then a project. That one idea became a school and that school has helped to shape many young hearts and minds.

Very few current school heads, directors, or principals were part of the first conversations that produced the Christian school in which they now minister. I can think of only perhaps four or five.

Some of those early pioneers involved with the inception of your school might have died some time ago, but perhaps not all. At this season of the year when we celebrate the divine mystery that produced an embryo, then an infant, and then a dying yet risen Savior, perhaps it would be good to send a word of thanks to those people, to commemorate their energy, their daring, their faithfulness to a vision.

And then lead your staff and students in prayers of thankfulness to the Lord for his blessing, his sustaining, and his prospering the school. Alas, I believe that I prayed more often for things we wanted to accomplish than I did, as a headmaster, offer prayers of thanks for what we had.