We are all connected
By Dr. James L. Edwards, President of Anderson University
If our national crisis has touched us and taught us about our life on this planet, it has demonstrated again that we are connected. When more than 4,000 persons were lost in New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania, we were touched on this campus as well.
Some students had relatives working in the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. One was reported safe, one injured, and one missing. Parents of two AU students were visiting New York to take in the U.S. Open Tennis Tournament. They were in a twelfth-floor room of a hotel within the shadows of the towers of the World Trade Center. They walked and then ran from the rumblings of falling debris. They comforted people fortunate to escape from the collapsing structures and in shock. Seven miles later, they called home to say, “We’re okay.”
As we gathered in chapel on that Tuesday morning, less than two hours from the first strike, we formed circles across Reardon Auditorium to pray for victims of the attacks and for our national leaders. We prayed for our new heroes — the firefighters, police officers, and emergency workers, once again New York’s finest. We also prayed for our families. In subsequent chapels and prayer meetings we have prayed for staff and students activated in military reserve units or in the National Guard. We have prayed for the desperately poor people fleeing the war zones into Pakistan. We have prayed to be courageous and imaginative peacemakers.
The university is a great place from which to confront these global and personal issues. We hosted a congressional national security briefing with our Congressman Mike Pence. We joined with church leaders on our campus to hold prayer vigils. Our professors offered briefings on the history, politics and cultural nature of Arabic states. We are having in depth discussions about Islam and the Christian faith, how they relate, and what has brought such conflict to a region of our world that has given birth to three of the world’s great religions. Our students have the benefit of hearing other perspectives on global issues from fellow students from lands close to centers of conflict.
Most of all, we can share in the blessed assurance that people of faith find when they center their lives in the Christian hope. We want to view life and the challenges of these days from a Christian faith perspective. I think of it as having a view through the lens of Christ. Through Christ we have a perspective that is the way to understand God’s presence in these times.
Lutheran writer and pastor Walter Wangerin says that for the first time in many years we can understand the times in which Christ walked this earth. In his day, zealots used the violence of terrorism to attack those who did not measure up to their standards of political or spiritual righteousness. We are all asking what righteous cause has brought such destruction and left so many in fear. Again, faith in Christ is the way to peace for these times and in all the affairs of life.
We are all connected in this global family. We weep with Christ over the sorrows of the children of God. And we search both for the courage to be faithful and the wisdom to offer the peace of God as a wide measure of mercy that reaches even further than our vast family’s need for justice.
