When a whale calf is born, its family must teach the newborn its first lesson: which way is up to the surface. Most animals learn their most important simple skills as quickly as they can. Within an hour of birth foals stand and run, venomous snakes can bite, and human babies cry. 

The cry of a baby is a call for help. Everything is new, and, without context of any kind the babe is immediately overwhelmed. This leads to the first lesson a baby must learn if it is to thrive: when I cry for help, that cry is answered. 

In the days, weeks, months that follow that cry is answered again and again and again.  Sometimes instantly, sometimes only after a groggy parent has roused from sleep and located the baby's midnight bottle, but it is answered. The lesson is reinforced: “If I ask for help, I shall receive it.” 

Time passes, our babies learn to roll over, focus their eyes, hold toys and bottles and battered board books in their grasp. They learn more ways to ask for help: to name something or someone, to move toward the toy or table, to raise their hands and plead for "Up."  They learn to walk. 

Then comes one of my favorite lessons: this new little person learns that when someone else cries for help, they can be the one to answer. They bring a tiny crying classmate a pacifier and try to place it where it will do the most good. They offer grass to the goats and swipe a wet towel across the table after snack time. They fetch me my shoes (even when I don't need them just yet).   

Somewhere in there, sooner or later, those lessons synthesize into something more complex: When I cry for help, I can also be the one to answer it. This gets trickier, as it is both absolutely necessary and also a great driver of disobedience. Still, we rejoice to see the little girl climb into her stroller and sit down because she's ready to go home, or the boy who wants to put his shoes back on his own feet after nap time, even if those shoes end up right-to-left and left-to-right. 

It keeps getting more complex from there, but the lifetime of learning starts with those foundations, and those foundations must be treasured and reinforced over a lifetime.  When a teacher calls for help because a mess needs more hands, and she is answered by colleagues, the first lesson is reinforced for all who are there to see and hear. When a student loans a pencil or speeds for the nurse's station after a classmate suffers a mishap, the second lesson is reinforced. When the bell rings to celebrate a student tackling a responsibility, and house points are awarded, the third lesson is reinforced. 

There is an adage that God will not give us more than we can handle, but I think, like 'happy as a clam', this adage is incomplete. The crosses we bear in our lives can absolutely be enough to overwhelm us individually, but as people, as Christians, as The Saint Constantine School, we are a community. God will not give us more than we can handle because when the burden grows too great, we turn to one another and ask "may we face this together? Yourself, myself, and God?"