Above All, Love One Another Deeply, Because Love Covers Over a Multitude of Sins

As a follow-up to my last post, I want to reiterate how incredibly impressed I have been at the students I've met in our public schools while on the Philadelphia Board of Education.  When I watch them perform, talk to them about their aspirations, or just observe them in class, I feel incredibly bullish about the future of our city.

However, I want to be careful about ascribing too much attention to such highlights.  Because I want to say that our kids deserve the best not because they are smart or talented or hard working or well-behaved.  They deserve the best because they are inherently valuable, made by a brilliant Creator and with their whole lives ahead of them.  They deserve the best in spite of and because of all of the challenges they must overcome, some of which I am aware of and some of which are invisible on the surface, which threaten to swallow them whole but against which they demonstrate remarkable resiliency and courage.

In the Bible, Peter's first epistle really crescendos in the fourth chapter.  The whole book has an urgent tone to it, borne of the very real exhortation that the path forward will involve suffering but that despite and through such suffering great joy awaits.  Right in the middle of that chapter is this lovely turn of phrase: "Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins."  Let us love our children, not because they do or say things that please us, but because they are inherently worth loving.