Chalkboards and the World

I walked into class to find a greeting on the chalkboard, which was "supposedly" from our professor. Obviously was not, professor Downey did not write this though, seeing as there were three exclamation points and hearts on the board. I'm still not sure who wrote it, but it didn't stop with the main message. Someone added a message at the top in Chinese, and as I was taking my seat, another student was writing something in Arabic. 

Normally you might think this is childish, or even disrespectful. But 1. This professor is just great and very relational and 2. This is a class only for Youth Ministry and Children's Ministry majors, so it's totally ok to have a little bit of fun. I had to add a little greeting in Czech (top left corner), and two other languages were added as well before our professor came in. He laughed, of course, and then at the end added his own version of "welcome", in Hungarian (where he lived with his family at one time as missionaries). 

At first I thought it was silly, just for fun. But I couldn't help smiling not only because of that, but because of what all of these greetings represented.

In this class alone (with only 11 students), one person is from Scotland, another grew up in Japan and China, someone else is from Egypt and Canada, I'm from Czech, my professor lived in Hungary, another student knew French, etc. etc. What a beautiful representation of the body of Christ, and what a privilege to get to learn alongside students from all over the world. We all come with different stories and experiences and can bring that to the classroom.

Although this is a school in the heart of Chicago, in the Midwest, in America, I love the hints of international culture spread throughout this campus. I also love realizing that we all came to learn more about God through His Word, and will probably go all over the world with the skills we learned here together.

Today was just one of those visual reminders of how big, yet small, the world is!