With the martin luther king Jr. holiday still fresh in our hearts and minds, I am reminded of one of the greatest reasons I love being a member of beatitudes campus. We are a beautiful tapestry of all different types of people. All unique and unrepeatable in our own ways. Much like our country, we have woven together the best of the best from all sorts of backgrounds, heritages, races, religions, countries, sexual orientations, physical abilities, educational backgrounds and ages.
Did you know we have Beatitudians from a multitude of countries? Even more from faith affiliations other than Christian. Racially, we are the living metaphor of a perfectly woven tapestry with nearly 60% of us identifying as other than Caucasian. We are Democrats, Republicans, Independents and no political affiliations. We are male and female and some who identify with neither. We are young, old and older. We are straight, gay, bi-sexual and transgender. We are single, married, divorced and widowed. We have children with two parents at home, single parents, married without children, grandparents raising grandkids and some of us are happily single forever. We are educated with advanced degrees and some with high school educations only. We speak English, german, Spanish, Chinese, Hungarian, French, Romanian and some languages you have yet to hear. We are financially wealthy, middle class, and some of us are just struggling to make ends meet.
Some of us remember every minute of our life and will tell you about it, and some of us have watched those memories slip away, but we can still feel them inside of us even if we cannot tell you about them now. We walk unassisted, with canes, with walkers and use mobile chairs to get to where we want to go. Not a person in this community is valued anymore or any less for who we are. It does not matter where we live on campus, which department we work in, whether we are staff, resident or administration, we are all equal.
What makes it even more beautiful is that we continue to weave more diversity into our tapestry whenever the opportunity is available to us. We yearn for new threads to be incorporated into our growing cloth. We know our diversity is one of our greatest strengths as a community. As a Campus, we come from a faith heritage that sees every child of God as that unique, beautiful, unrepeatable and loved beyond love creation. How can we not see our coming together as a community as anything less than the most beautiful as all of the different threads of our histories and heritages come together?
So want to see something beautiful? Just look around you and see all of the amazing people who make up Beatitudes Campus. And they see you as beautiful as well. It doesn't get more beautiful than this.
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