When I first came to Univeristy, I decided to take an introductory course in Canadian Studies. I have since chosen to minor in this subject. I am attracted to this educational department becuase it allows me to study a wide variety of different subjects (literature studies, environmental studies, gender studies, Indigenous studies, and history - just to name a few) while also learning about the country that I love so much. It just makes sense.
Right away my professors told me that Canadian Studies would bring up all the skelletons hiding in my country's closet and show us what a rotten place this is.
My professors delievered on this promise.
In fact, all of the courses I have taken seem dedicated to proving how much people suck, and not just Canadians, but all people.
I have learned more fully about racism, classism, sexism, poverty, wars, animal abuse, ageism, and the environmental crisis which we are currently experiencing.
People brought on all of this stuff.
People fight, people exclude, people hate, people steal, people kill, and people refuse to help one another.
My professors seem to agree with my Christian beliefs on at least one point: there is something wrong with us human beings.
I remember when I was in my first year of university there was a guy in fourth year in my introductory English Literature class.
This guy had failed this course in first year and so he was coming back to try again. He always seemed so bitter and jaded. I called him out on his cynicism one time and he said that he used to be idealistic in first year too, but that university makes you cynical and apathetic. He predicted that none of us would still be idealistic or optimistic come fourth year.
At first, this both worried and sadened me, but later it became a challange, and it was a challenge that I accepted.
I will not give into apathy or cynisism!
Last year, I took a course which was crosslisted between Environmental Studies, Canadian Studies, Geography, and Indigenous Studies. It was a very alternative education sort of course. I loved this aspect of it, but because this class was all about the environmental crisis it often made me feel depressed. Being the bluntly honest person I am, I brought up my emotions surrounding the subject of the course. We all decided that we could not give into depression, that would mean giving up and then nothing would get better.
A few weeks ago, I bumped into a Marxist on campus. I told him that I thought communism made a lot of sense on paper and had a lot of beautiful asperations, but that history has shown us that it won't work because of human selfishness, so I din't want to risk trying it again.
He told me that if I talked like that I would just become apathetic and not do anything to change the world. His idea seems to be that we have to keep trying to fight against our humanity.
I believe that too, but I don't think that I can do it on my own.
This is such a big part of why I am a Christian.
Sometimes, I get really caught up in the monotony of every day living. I get tired of the monotony of trying on all my own strength not to give into my less than loving impulses, to figure things out in my head, to learn about all these bad things in our society, and to find a solution to it all. Sometimes all of these tiring things preocupy me so much that I forget about the hope I have found in a God who loves me, forgives me, instructs me in the best way to live out this life, and enables me to do it.
Without this hope, all the things I'm learning about my world get me down and make me want to give up on trying to make it a better place or be a better person. When I focus on the hope I have it affects every part of my life.
You can think what you want about all this, all I'm saying is that, for me, I am nothing without my hopes in Jesus. I am an apathetic, depressed, joy-less, mess who barely wants to keep on living, but when I fix my eyes on the hope of Jesus I suddenly feel like I can wake up and get out of bed and love my neighbour, because I know I am loved.
It's true that, even though I know the God I trust in, I find it hard to get out of bed sometimes: I.E. when I forget about the beauty of Jesus and so it cannot inspire my life. I am human and sometimes I focus on the wrong things, but what I want to tell you is that I have found (and there is no lie here) that when I focus my mind on Jesus, I find hope to keep living.
ARagTagHooligan
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