Hunkering down

As I write this, a hurricane has come. The fear factor began days ago: overly cautious weather predictors telling the world that we were facing doom. This storm (roughly the size of Arizona, so say some experts) churned northeast through the Pacific Ocean, and sometime today, hit Baja. It's gone past us here in San Diego and is now headed up Interstate 15 (probably in the carpool lane) roughly in the same path as our drive home from this San Diego-area resort. I've been here for a few days with my wife and a few hundred Biola University faculty and their spouses and some kids. It's been many years since Biola's leadership has ponied up the money to pay for a lavish faculty retreat. The morale of the faculty has been low post-pandemic and a generous donor made this year's retreat an epic moment of refreshment before we face a year of more financial uncertainty — storms, lots of them, on the horizon. I'll return to campus next week to a room re-crafted into office space in a building I've never worked in. The office I've occupied the last few years will, along with the entirety of Perez Hall, be bashed to pieces and hauled off to make way for a ground-breaking ceremony in October for a new building to house Biola's School of Cinema & Media Arts. The building in this photo was where we've stored materials over the last several years during times of growth in Digital Media & Journalism. It was picked up by some heavy equipment and hauled up toward the center of campus and left behind the cafeteria building. I happened past it one day on the way to a meeting. And it struck me: everything about higher education is, and has been for centuries, a thing in transit. There's no real permanency in what we do or where we do it. Journalism is changing; media that convey journalism changing too — hauled off like this building into new places. Our provost Matt Hall said we're in exile as believers in Jesus seeking to teach and guide students. And our new dean of the Talbot School of Theology told us, as we brunched and got ready to head back to Orange County, that we're a people who run into the storm, not away from it. This moment, this storm, doesn't thwart our mission, our purpose; if anything, it shows more clearly why what we do as believers in Jesus is essential to this lonely and troubled world. We bring hope — the hope Jesus gave us. And that's a rock that nobody is going to haul away.