Grads going into a world dying for hope
By Dedrick J. Minor

Graduations are unique among the milestones of our lives because they celebrate past accomplishments while also anticipating the future.

We have endured four (or more!) strenuous years of academic study and have successfully completed our own individual majors. These are definitely things we should be proud of.

With graduation quickly approaching, many seniors are becoming increasingly more aware of the enormous transition that is about to take place in their lives. Being a senior myself, I have been pondering what the true significance of the graduation event is.

Not until a couple of days ago did I recognize that graduation is the mark of transition from looking egocentrically at the world to looking outward at the world by infecting it with hope. We must move from the encapsulated world of ORU into a world that is dying for the hope that we have found in Jesus Christ.

When we look toward our future, we must realize that it is the time when we are to give of ourselves to those who have not had the opportunity to experience the things we have experienced.

After graduation is not the time to withdraw from the world in the hope that a better world will somehow evolve, but rather to actively participate in the world in order to aid in the coming of a better one.

In fact, Christianity itself has its essence and its goal not in itself, but in something that reaches far beyond itself. This is significant to us because, from the time many of us were born, life has been all about us.

Children are extraordinarily egocentric, and as children we felt that we were the center of our own individual universes by actually believing that everybody else experienced the world as we did. It should not be mistaken then that one of the purposes of the graduation event is to symbolize the process of moving us beyond egocentric thought.

You may ask, "How is the applicable to the ORU graduates in particular?" As graduates, we must "go into every person's world" and infect it with hope.

This is a hope that speaks to men and women everywhere and declares in a loud voice that things do not have to be as they have always been; that things can and will change; that something good can actually happen.

To the homeless, we will be shelter; to the sick, we will be medicine; to the hungry, we will be food; and to those who walk in darkness, we will be light. We will be like an arrow sent out into the world to point to a future full of hope.

In order that we as graduates might have a full and rewarding future, we must move from limited egocentric thought to an unlimited, others-centered view by looking outward.

We must take the responsibility as hope-bearers to reveal to a world meandering in hopelessness the God who holds all possibilities in his hand. We also must take the responsibility as hope bearers to stand between the living and the dead to declare the future of the crucified Christ.

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