This week was a time for some real reflection on our past year in SIFE and a time to look forward with a vision of our potential future. But what really matters is now, this moment.
As college students, we spend each moment with the purpose of increasing our understanding of the world and our ability to change it. Education without action is meaningless.
As we think about the more than 50,000 college students in our local Riverside area alone, imagine what is possible when we work together. As I look out at the smoke-filled sky and colored moon from fires still burning in our area, I feel that I should not be sitting here in my office but doing something about it. Our SIFE team has spent years looking at poverty, lack of basic healthcare, areas with no educational opportunities, and destroyed communities as the problems, spread like a fire unchecked. The question remained the same "What can we do?" We are not the same team we were when many of us started on this team two years ago. Once we were unsure of what we could accomplish.
What I can say in pride of this team after two years of changing, motivating, and building is that the response to the question is no longer "I don't know what we can do," but rather "Here's something we can do" leading to "Here is what we are going to do right now." Something happened to our generation and many of us are now waking up from it. We are seeing a movement of young people no longer saying "Oh no! Somebody do something," or even worse "I don't know/care, someone else can handle it," but now having a hunger to engage themselves in the world around them. Our team shared this through our words at the World Cup, and once again, it is time for all of us to share it through our actions. Thank you all so much for supporting the actions of our team. And thank you to those of you who celebrated with us in University Worship today. Dr. Wisbey said such wonderful things about our team and the potential of the students of La Sierra University. I see the symbol of our work over the past couple of years not as our National Trophy and World Cup, but rather the living testament of how hard the SIFE team is working.
Every day we have opportunities to make a difference. Every moment, we have a choice. That World Cup says that I was a part of changing the world and inspiring individuals all around it. What do my actions right now say?
Having that drive, that determination to make a difference, the firm belief that nothing is impossible, that we will have an impact, the realization that we must learn all we can to increase the potential of that impact: that is what it means to be a champion, and that is what it means to be a student of La Sierra University.
