New Year’s Reservations
With our winter break coming to a close, we at Pinnacle hope you and your family have enjoyed a rich and fulfilling celebration of Christ’s advent. As we enter the new year, many of us have goals and aspirations on our minds. We want to have a productive year, and we tell ourselves that we’ll do better this year than we did in 2025. But perhaps we should approach our plans for 2026 with some caution.
New year’s resolutions often get a bad rap. On the one hand, it shouldn’t take a new year for us to decide to get enough exercise or be more patient or spend more time in prayer. On the other hand, we often set impossibly high goals for ourselves in the new year and then give up the first time we inevitably fail. January’s gyms are filled with good intentions doomed to a short life.
Practically, however, there are lots of benefits to setting goals. A goal can take an amorphous aspiration and give us something concrete to work towards. More importantly, setting goals forces us to consider what truly matters and to prioritize steps that promote that end. But goal-setting can also become a burden when it turns into a yearly ritual where we size up our life’s greatest failures, resolve to do better, and then invariably fail because we had the wrong perspective from the outset.
Pinnacle Classical Academy seeks to graduate students instilled with a lifelong love of learning, equipped for service in love to God and man. This is our goal for our graduates. It’s a difficult goal to quantify or boil down to a checklist, because ultimately this kind of growth doesn’t come from ourselves. It’s not the kind of person we can simply wake up and decide to be.
Our students will all experience growth of some kind in 2026. Little milestones are happening all the time—a tooth lost, a Latin list mastered—but it’s difficult to put a measure on loving God with all of one’s heart and life. Of course, we have academic tools like standardized tests to measure advancement in learning, but they cannot fully capture how much a person has grown, either academically or, more importantly, in maturity and character. We see growth towards these things each time a student shows a readiness to help out, takes a bit more responsibility for his work, or displays wisdom in how he uses his time. But these are not milestones we reach simply by deciding to “do better”, but by the gradual change in our hearts that comes through maturity and sanctification.
We want our students to understand that we grow in character not by willing ourselves to make better choices but by trusting in the Lord and not in our own understanding. We are sanctified not simply by choosing to be better people but by the gracious work of the Holy Spirit. Our role as educators is to guide our students to lean on Christ and to give them the tools to live as He calls them to.
Often the heart is stronger than the will. It’s not wrong for us to resolve to pursue goodness; in fact, it’s an admirable desire. But the way to ensure we will continue our long obedience in the same direction is not to resolve to be good—resolve is frequently confined to short, futile bursts of devotion for the first two weeks of January. Rather, it is to love goodness.
As my pastor recently put it, “Our habits are stronger than our resolve.” What have we conditioned ourselves to love? What habits have we formed and what virtues have we practiced all year long to shape us into who we are today? Hopefully, the answer is that we have pursued Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. To that end, we seek to train our students’ hearts as best we can to love the right things. Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things (Phil. 4:8).
Laurel McLaughlin
Upper School Teacher
