Welcome to the 2020-21 Academic Year
Categories: Léo’s Insights 2020-2021
Getting started is the hardest part of any venture or project. Blogging is no different.
My biggest concern with blogging has always been that I wished it could be more current. Our processes were labour and time intensive, complicated by our need to have all involved at one place and time. This has changed somewhat with our new ability to capture these efforts right here in my office.
My blogs are usually created long before they are presented to the public, this new ability does streamline the process and gives me more direct control over what is said and when they are completed. Plus, I now have the ability to deal fairly quickly with new issues and events, if the need arises.
Now, for a full disclosure! The following blogs were written at a time when we were sequestered to “voluntary” quarantine. The world appeared to be unravelling with a viral pandemic, consequent economic hardships and of all things, a run on toilet paper!
Rather than sit around, which I find very hard to do, I went to my shop, created a number of artistically pleasing wooden artifacts and wrote blogs destined to be offered during this academic year. You could say that I got a jump on my tasks.
However, I was challenged by having to predict what the world would look like six months from now. While everyone was hoping that we would return to normal, we all intrinsically knew that was not likely to happen, but expecting that we would ultimately be faced with a need to adapt to a new normal.
That is, we generally expected the governments of the day to implement changes to the way things were done in order to accommodate a new reality and that a lot of those changes would become permanent. I personally expected to see this for the delivery of education in this province, as well.
To be sure, as is usually the case when something novel rocks our world, there were those who saw the whole thing as a big conspiracy to introduce greater government power and control. Others were convinced the world would devolve into anarchy and purchased guns and ammunition to… who knows what they were thinking?
Still others clung to every word the media presented without seriously considering just how reliable or factual the news was. And, … there was no toilet paper to be found as hoarders collected as much of it as possible, in spite of the fact that the COVID-19 virus did not cause intestinal disorders. This led to a great number of interesting explanations, many of which were quite amusing!
I would venture to guess that more people focussed on what the government was doing to prevent the virus from proliferating than on the fact that even in very trying times, God is still in control. No doubt there were many people wondering how God could allow such an awful thing to be experienced by so many.
I can think of two things to say respecting this event.
The first is that we should not be blaming the God we have evicted from the public square. Somehow, we have forgotten that when we kick God out, hell shows up! Nature abhors a vacuum, it is said, and when God does not occupy a place in our hearts, something else will.
The question becomes, when adversity strikes, do we renew our faith in God or do we increase our fear of what others or the government might do?
My second thought is that whether we believe in God or not, when the sun shines or the rain falls it shines or falls on all of us. Christians are famous for thinking they are exempt from unpleasant things, but that is not realistic. While we are a part of this fallen world, we can expect bad things to happen to both good and bad people.
If utopia is what you are looking for, then apart from heaven, you will only find it in the spiritual realm and even then, God uses bad things to help mold people to be the best that they can be.
I have no idea what the world will look like when this blog is published, but there is one thing I can say with a very high degree of certainty and that is, God will today be the same God He was back in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. He does not change even when people or situations do.
That is what has and will sustain me both now and in the future. I sincerely hope that is your position as well.
Well, I pray these blogs will minister to you in spite of having been written months before being published. Please glean what you can from this series even if some of the comments are a bit out of sync with the new world the pandemic likely introduced into our lives.
Previous Post: Yield Not to Temptation
Next Post: The School’s Most Important Function! Schools Are “Outed”! (Part 1)