Are you reverent? Is this relevant anyway? Administrators, teachers, staff and students…good morning! Thank you for this forced opportunity in allowing me to share my insights with God’s wisdom about our theme for this month “Reverence for God’s Creation”.
Let me start by clearly understanding the word reverence. What do we mean by this? Reverence is an aspect of adoration, it is a true response that leads to worship to all that come before God. It is recognizing and honoring the authority of God with awe and fear because He is God, and He is more awesome than anything or anyone. It also means respecting people, not because of their position and authority, but as brothers and sisters in the Lord, regardless of their personality, and knowing that He (God) loves them too and reverence means also caring for nature.
All that has been created is the handiwork of God. Thus, as the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God”. But let us see today’s reality, the world that has been magnificently created and formed by God, the world that has been marvelously ordered and arranged by God, the world that has been graciously sustained and preserved by God, is now threatened by arms race, regional conflicts, continued discrimination and injustice among peoples and nations and lack of due respect for nature, a world that wears human smudge and shares human smell. To whom can we attribute the culpability of these destructions? Who or what can help us see and realize whether or not what we are doing fits with the ongoing work of God’s creation? Are we one of its caretakers or destroyers? As a student, do you give due respect to God’s creation? To your self by knowing and doing your responsibilities, to your classmates and schoolmates by not bullying them but by helping them to be good and be responsible like you, to your classroom and school campus by keeping them clean instead of littering, to your teachers by greeting them either...