A Prayer for Students

Walter S. Reuling, 1998

Gracious Heavenly Father, we gather today in thanks and appreciation
for colleagues, for this beautiful campus, for our students, and for opportunity.

We thank You for those golden young persons in our care who are easy
to love, those who look, think, behave, and value just as we do. How
rewarding and energizing and encouraging and uplifting they are to us,
and we're grateful for their presence with us.

Heavenly Father, we also thank you for those students who are not
like us, who have not yet found their way, who are lost and abused --
sometimes damaged -- who are unattractive, who come to us with little
direction, little or no motivation, often lacking in purpose and
self-esteem, and usually with preferences and values quite foreign to
those we now hold.

Father, these, too, are Your children and this is our mission. They
are who we once were and indeed a small part of who we now are as we
relate to authority, to competing pressures of family life, to
leadership, to a world of changing values, to strange and different
ideas, to life and work as it really is.

Lord, give us the compassion, the resolve, the strength, the stamina,
and the wisdom to make this work - to do Your work in this,
Your Kingdom.

We ask this in Your Son's name. AMEN.

-- Given at an August 1996 faculty meeting by
Walter S. Reuling (LWC provost 1992-97,
President 1997-1998)