Article May 29, 2017 Issue

Campus safety and ‘Truth’s motto’

Stephen Senge

As a professor with an active class schedule, I took special note when national news reports described violence in college classrooms. I began to carefully consider my responsibility for the safety of the students. After several of these reports, campus security leaders issued various protocols regarding appropriate action in the event of a threat to classroom safety. These good-faith attempts to cover many possibilities contained numerous and specific directions.

My concern heightened when each communication closed with the reminder that the campus security force could not cover every location all the time. To this last observation, I silently responded that my answer lay in trusting God’s ever-presence.

The Bible provides numerous accounts of blessings resulting from trusting God’s care and direction. Take, for example, Ruth and Nehemiah, who both relied on God’s ready assistance. Ruth moved away from her home in Moab to assist a beloved family member, and Nehemiah returned to Jerusalem to manage the reconstruction of the city’s crumbled walls. Neither of them could have anticipated exactly how they would fulfill their respective assignments. However, they did not just “wing it”—to use a modern phrase; they humbly and earnestly trusted God.

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