One Little Word
By Athena Metzger
I was so tired that I couldn’t see straight, and to make matters worse I couldn’t fall asleep even after a thirteen-hour day of organizing, cleaning and painting. 
This past Saturday several families labored together to ready Faith Christian Academy for its annual Kindergarten Roundup. Some pitched in for a few hours, but the Triers, Vargas and Metzgers made an entire day of the project, finally calling it quits about 10:45 p.m. The adults and children had become weary and bleary eyed long before that time. The two babies of the group woke up from their cat naps and joined the grand finale. Our hard work yielded major improvement, but we had only scratched the surface of the long overdue remodeling.
The Saturday a week prior also proved a marathon day for FCA families, putting on a fish fry and a silent auction. Two Saturdays gone, my remodeling projects and work at home were mounting. “This is insane,” I said to myself.
I can list a lot of seemingly crazy things that have to happen because of one little word: my kids’ teachers sacrifice their livelihoods working for sub-poverty level wages; families spend small fortunes in gas expenses driving our children back and forth to school; I spend close to an hour a day transporting my kids to school when a public school bus would save time and money; our school operates on a shoestring budget – there’s no money for janitors or cafeteria workers – our families volunteer to perform these duties; in addition, families sacrifice thousands of dollars of discretionary income to pay for tuition when they already pay thousands in taxes that go to the public schools.
There are so many people giving so much and giving up so much that it would be difficult to list it all. Why are families sacrificing so much?
I’ll tell you why we all do it: because of one little word – God.
Athena Metzger is the mother of three, a lifeguard and a gymnastics instructor. She is also a contributing writer to Talk of the Town.