Hello World

Immersed and surrounded by ideas, emotions, and lifestyles that push and pull at my comfort zones, my first two weeks at Laurier have been invigorating and exhausting all at the same time. This morning, at an equity forum, we opened the event with an aboriginal "smudge", song, and prayer. The smudge was the burning of sweet grass, sage, cedar, and tobacco in a hollowed out stone. A lady waved the smoke around with a feather and some people took the smoke and moved it over their head and hair with their hands. Another lady explained that the ceremony was meant to cleanse the room and to cleanse the person, allowing him/her to leave behind everything and start the day with a clean slate.

The plenary speaker for the forum was an educated, ex-prof of the University of Waterloo, who had been in Cairo during the recent revolution. His presentation was fascinating and more so since he had been a first hand witness of a such a cataclysmic uprising. During the Q&A, I had asked him a question as to whether the majority of protesters even knew what they were marching for or if they were merely being swept away by the mob. My experience with marching and protesting in Bolivia was that most people were not really sure what the battle was about. As a result, he sat down to chat and have lunch with me.

He told me a story as we had lunch:

A man came to live in a new town with his family. During his tour, the guide led him to the cemetery. Checking out the headstones, he noted that all the deceased had only lived a few short weeks or as much as several years. Appalled, he asked, "Why would I come live here with my family when town members live such short lives?" His companion replied, "No, sir, here in this town, we don't record the lifespan of a person, but the amount of time he or she invested into the community."

My lunch companion then concluded that the true value of a person lies in what they contribute to society. As a current example, he continued to say that therefore Jack Layton was a person of greater value than Stephen Harper. With respect, I disagreed with him.

There will be no shortage of disagreement over the next 18 months of school, but I can learn antithetical perspectives without adopting them. I can also find a wide array of areas where I will agree with some of my polar-opposite peers. My body is tired but my mind is alive as I engage the rigor of academia again. Meditating on portions of the first chapter of Philippians, I pray that knowledge, depth of insight, and discernment will abound in me and flow out of a place of love so that when it comes time to defend the gospel, I can do so with integrity and respect. So that when the opportunity arises, I can share that Jesus is the only cleansing smudge. So that even when confronted with intelligent, educated professors, I can respectfully insist that real value is not measured by what we do, but rather in who we are.