International

I'm not entirely sure how it happened, but I now have friends who live all over the world. Some are friends from SPU who have decided to burst from its Queen Anne walls and live out the motto continually engrained in our minds: engage the culture. Others are Upward Bound students that I met in Austria this summer. A few are old family friends who have tucked themselves quietly into that beautiful corner of the world called Germany. And here I am, in Seattle, with hopes and dreams that span the globe. It's finals week and I think that this week, more than any, makes me want to do nothing more than travel. Experience. Live.

I have been studying Economic Geography, International Peace and World Order, and Global and Urban Ministries this quarter. Though I mentally checked out of these classes a few weeks ago, my heart is still very much in my studies. I want to dissolve the disparity in the world, I want the victims of war to be healed and I want to know the stories of those who need to tell them. It is hard to concentrate on my research papers when all I want to do is get out of the classroom and into the world. I need to keep reminding myself that these four years in school are just the final stepping stone and then I need to keep reminding myself that's probably not true.

Is there really ever a final stepping stone? First we are born, then there is elementary school, middle school and high school. We are encouraged to attend college and told that after that, we enter the "real" world. Is the real world that the adults tell me about really all that different from what I am experiencing now? I work in an office with adults and I work at a bakery with people who are not in school...is this really the real world? Why is it that our educational status separates us from the real world? I am living a very real life right now and I think I am already in the real world. It is a world where the things that I study in class are out of that days' New York Times and where I read articles on the racialization of the Seattle Public School that I attended. These issues are real and they stab me in the heart every day. So why do I want to study something that seems so full of despair?

Because there is HOPE.

We don't read these depressing articles on the state of our world for nothing. We read them to learn from them and to give a meager attempt at solving them. We see the small, but significant, things we can do to help. If Philip Eaton really wants us to engage the culture and change the world, we have to get out and see (what is sometimes the sad) truth that is our world. It will not be like this forever. No, of this I am confident. There will be a day that all will be well and history will be a fading memory. Until then, I will continue to learn and implement the small amounts of change that I myself am capable of.