Preparing to start an activity, NCS senior Brooks Cummings passes out slips of paper to a group of 6th grade students on Wednesday of Spiritual Emphasis Week,

Do you always think about everything you say? Odds are, there have been times when you haven’t. That was the whole goal of this year’s Spiritual Emphasis Week, to teach people to “speak with good purpose.”

This goal was created by Landry Smith, the school’s campus minister. He said, “In talking with other teachers and administration, we saw a desire to see students realize how much their words mean to each other and the need to encourage one another and take a look at what’s in our heart being reflected through speech.”

In order to teach this lesson, students had small groups Monday through Wednesday. The purpose of Monday’s small group was to teach high school students about speaking with good purpose. Tuesday then gave them the opportunity to plan for Wednesday, where they would teach kids in the lower school the same important lesson.

Sam Wilson, a junior who helped teach lower school students, said, “We talked about how saying stuff can have a negative impact on someone else. Even though you think it doesn’t affect them as much, they might take it the wrong way, and it’s hard to take it back. [To teach the lesson] we got a tube of toothpaste, and emptied it out and told the eighth graders to try to put the toothpaste back in with the toothpick.”

The toothpaste Sam was describing represented our words. The idea is that trying to put the toothpaste back in is almost as hard as it is to take back our words. This helped to further illustrate that once your words are out there, you can’t get them back.

This activity provided students a good opportunity to teach others an important lesson, but that’s not to say it went without any “strange” occurrences.

Seven Gross, a senior, said, “Some 6th grade kids in our group ate toothpaste. It made me feel distressed, but excited because they learned about using kind words.”

To continue Spiritual Emphasis week, there was a school wide chapel on Thursday, where students dressed up in their dress uniform to celebrate. Chris Nichols from Crosspoint was a guest speaker, who discussed the parable of the good Samaritan and gave a good talk relating to treating all people with kindness.

Chandler White, a senior, said, “We wore our nicest dress up attire. Mr. Nichols spoke. I thought that it went pretty well. There was a lot of participation across the entire gym and the lesson correlated perfectly with our emphasis for the week.”

Overall, Spiritual Emphasis Week provided many surprises and good moments. Every day of it was planned out to teach people how to speak with good intentions, and as Chandler White said, “I think the school did a good job.”