For the beginning
Choose life for others
A new semester seems that it is a time to enter a new land that I do not know how to occupy and it is a time to meet students whom I do not know how to teach.
I feel worried, anxious and afraid of being led astray and, like in the first reading, adoring and serving other gods in which I will certainly fail and perish.
It looks like a similar feeling that I felt in the beginning of the last year which makes me realize that there is no easy way, no gain without pain, and no resurrection without suffering.
It is a time to ask an important question, that is, a life and death question.
What do l want to do with my life? What is the most important thing I would like to keep in the semester? What is the meaning of meeting and teaching students?
Jesus says, “For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever looses his life for my sake will save it”(Luke 9,24).
So the answer is clear: choose life, not for yourself but for others in which you and your students may live.
Life, prosperity, blessing or death, doom, curse depend on our choice. All good things including the bad result from our choice.
The responsorial psalm also says that blessed are they who hope in the Lord, not in himself/herself.
Therefore, let’s begin a new semester, trusting in God’s mercy, loving him and walking in his ways and keeping his commandments, statutes and decrees. It means we must deny ourselves and take up our cross daily and follow Him.
We can only live one day at a time, not a week nor a semester, meet one student at a time, not a whole class, teach one thing at a time, not truth itself.
We may suffer some but not greatly, may be disregarded by some but not be rejected by all, may be hurt in feeling but not be killed.
If we suffer greatly and be rejected by all and be killed, that would be fine because God will raise us on the third day. Period.
Don’t be afraid. Enter the land to occupy and meet the students to make them grow for good.
You will be like a tree planted near running water that yields its fruit in due season and whose leaves never fade and whatever you do, prospers. God bless you. Amen.
