Fruit

The featured image is a few months before I opened the Living Water School. My oldest was just finishing preschool. I started the school to meet his needs since he was starting kindergarten. My daughter was a baby and his brother was 3 and in faith I dragged them all to the school with me.

Ten years ago, I founded The Living Water School to give my creative five-year-old firstborn a chance to learn in an environment that would embrace him exactly as God created him. That original vision has since grown beyond our family, blessing many other students with the freedom and intellectual formation to discover and pursue the purpose God has for their lives.

My son is fifteen now, and I wanted to share the fruit of this work.

When Damon Prather and I opened The Living Water School, we stepped out in faith. We had no clear sense of how the journey would unfold, and many people doubted us—either because they disagreed with our belief in granting children genuine freedom (through the Sudbury Model), or because they challenged our conviction that Black students belong fully within a classical, liberal arts education. It has often been a lonely and frightening road. We asked ourselves the hard questions: What if we were wrong? What if our children were harmed by this experiment? What if, in the process of serving other families, our own children fell through the cracks?

Today, I see my answer.

My son recently wandered freely into the woods behind our house—not for an assignment, not because he was told to, but simply because he wanted to think and write. There, he composed a beautiful poem. When he later shared a video of his work, I saw the very synthesis that inspired this school taking shape in him. His freedom to think in the woods echoes the spirit of George Washington Carver and Henry David Thoreau. His poetic voice—shaped by the rich vocabulary, rhythm, and imagination of the literature he has encountered—carries the same creative lineage as ancestors like James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Chinua Achebe, and Alain Locke: writers who engaged classical texts and transformed them into something deeply their own.

In that moment, I could do nothing but thank God—for the strength, the courage, and the perseverance to keep moving forward in obedience, even through doubt, fear, and resistance. What He planted in faith ten years ago is bearing fruit, and I am in awe.