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President Clark’s Opening Address

By Tyler Clark

Back in my hometown, there’s an assisted living facility that provides elderly people an affordable place to stay. Every now and then, my home congregation partners with them to do service projects in the surrounding community.

On one of these days, we went to the nearby park to spruce it up a bit. We dug up thorny weeds, painted the bridge a horrible bright red and planted trees. I am a bit ashamed to tell you this was one of those service projects I was sort of roped into by my parental unit, and I went through the day grumbling and complaining, wishing I was in bed watching “Parks and Rec” while consuming strawberry Pop Tarts.

So the day ended. I learned nothing. Only cared for myself.

It wasn’t until later I realized the beauty of what had happened that day. The elderly folks were planting seeds. They were taking actions to beautify the park even though they would never see the benefits of what they had done that day, a demonstration of selfless love.

Diane Nash recently came to our campus to speak about her role during the Civil Rights movement. In the face of immense opposition and hatred, she chose love. She saw a hateful individual as someone who was able to be loved instead of seeing them for their hateful actions. This seems impossible to me. When asked why she did it, she said, “We are doing this for generations yet unborn. Though we had not met you, we had loved you. We were trying to bring about the best society for you to be born into and come of age into.”

People ask me about my visions and goals for Oklahoma Christian. To a certain extent, they don’t matter. The senators in the Student Government Association do most of the work. They will put in countless hours to improve the school in the areas they are most passionate about. My job is to inspire and enable SGA to do our best work.

Too often a student body president is in and out. One and done. The student government only has the energy and focus to make it through a single year.

I know we have the passion and ability to look beyond ourselves and not only make this school a better place today, but also for years to come. This will be difficult because this requires trust for the future SGA to continue what has been started and we must give up instant gratification, but we can do it. Let’s dream big. We can plan events that may not come together until three years from now. Let’s sit down together and think about how we can fully utilize our campus as Christian community.

Let’s plant seeds together.

 

Tyler Clark is a sophomore at Oklahoma Christian University. 

The opinions of guest columnists are their own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Talon or Oklahoma Christian University. Guest opinions are presented to foster public debate on important topics and comments should be respectful and signed.

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