SCHEDULING in Christian schools is not just about the technicalities of slicing the day into bits of time. It is really about the way in which we think about children, their relationship to each other and the teachers who care for them, and their relationship to God, who created day and night.

Reading this book will teach you about how the school should steward time so that its children can participate in, experience, and benefit from the school's mission. And time is about light and dark. These are God-given gifts that have deep spiritual significance and we should treat them with great seriousness.

The first creative act of God was to say: "Let there be light!" This light was a contrast to the "darkness that was on the face of the deep." Light thus becomes, at the beginning of time, both a physical and metaphorical manifestation of God's grace as the "light of the world" (John 1:4-5, 8:12, 9:5). Jesus is the light of the world and we are members of Christ's Body (1 Corinthians 6:15). Jesus declares as part of the Beatitudes that we are the "light of the world" (Matthew 5:14), an echo of Isaiah's prophecy that we are to be a light to the Gentiles (Isaiah 42:6): "I, the Lord, have called you in righteousness; I will take hold of your hand. I will keep you and will make you to be a covenant for the people and a light for the Gentiles." Being a light to the Gentiles is, of course, soteriological, but it also calls us to an ethical life of "goodness, righteousness, and truth" (Ephesians 5:8-9).

The job of scheduling is as holy as any other kind of task. You might have thought of it as merely technical, maybe even bureaucratic. We think of scheduling as a foundation block of excellent education. Together with your budget, the schedule is the outward sign of your mission in practice. This book explores how to do that very well.