This week I am writing this article from a bus that is currently winding its way toward the snowy mountains with the Year 10 PASS students on board. Around me students are playing cards, chatting with each other and a few are listening to music or having a nap. There is a sense of anticipation as we head closer to Jindabyne and the beginning of our adventure. Later this week our Year 5 cohort will have their own adventure as they cross the dividing range to Bathurst, and a small group of Year 11 students are headed to Bali to experience a different culture as they learn and serve in a small community for women and children.

Some people can at times wonder why schools such as Green Point include excursions and camps like these as part of our curriculum. They take resource and effort and cost to undertake.

For me, these types of adventures along with the many other excursions and trips undertaken, are so vital to the Christian education we seek to acheive at Green Point.

God has created a huge world around us, and as human beings we learn through all our senses. Students need opportunities to sit in creation, to experience new and strange things, rub shoulders with people different to themselves, to gaze and travel over the horizon of the normal vista. We all need to experience things outside of ourselves and to be challenged in new and unusual environments.

For our students, this can require them to cultivate new skills, and to overcome adversity. In our world where it is currently so easy for students to be absorbed inward toward self, opportunities to look up, out, and beyond themselves are becoming even more important.

Excursions and trips are so valuable as we seek to help students develop to be socially engaged, lifelong learners and people of Godly character. The practices that students engage in whilst on these adventures, from simply living with others, to challenging themselves with new activities provide significant opportunities for both growth and experience.

Another and even better benefit, is the opportunity to experience the majesty and awesomeness of Gods’ Creation. For the PASS students this week that creation is the snowy mountains. Being in creation reminds me how creation declares God’s glory, so I will finish this weeks article with Psalm 98:

Sing to the Lord a new song,
    for he has done marvelous things;
his right hand and his holy arm
    have worked salvation for him.
The Lord has made his salvation known
    and revealed his righteousness to the nations.
He has remembered his love
    and his faithfulness to Israel;
all the ends of the earth have seen
    the salvation of our God.

Shout for joy to the Lord, all the earth,
    burst into jubilant song with music;
make music to the Lord with the harp,
    with the harp and the sound of singing,
with trumpets and the blast of the ram’s horn—
    shout for joy before the Lord, the King.

Let the sea resound, and everything in it,
    the world, and all who live in it.
Let the rivers clap their hands,
    let the mountains sing together for joy;
let them sing before the Lord,
    for he comes to judge the earth.
He will judge the world in righteousness
    and the peoples with equity.