By Serenity Beaumont, Spiritual Life Junior Division Head

Each of us naturally find familiarity to be one of the greatest comforts of life. We always tend to repeat the same expressions and do the same things over and over again because it’s easy for us.

There is a sense of safety and security in the luxury of familiarity. But often familiarity causes us to take the things we have and the ones we love for granted. As students and teachers who are obligated to go to school everyday, we have a cycle of reluctantly waking up, getting ready, driving to school, working in school, doing homework, and going to sleep. As we have noticed in the past few full weeks of school, this is a tedious cycle we always do all the time without ceasing. And this cycle can cause us to forget about the reason why we even do it in the first place: to get a valuable education. There are many children and young adults who don’t have educations. I believe this is the danger of ignorance because we are often so caught in the familiarity and the comfort routines bring us that we don’t tend to think of others who don’t have our luxuries.

One of the greatest needs in life is to experience the familiar and the brand new. I’m not saying that we should stop going to school every day as it is a necessity. But we should wake up thinking new thoughts and uncovering fresh insights. John 10:10 says, “the thief comes only to steal kill and destroy. [God] came that [we] may have life and have it abundantly.” The key word in this verse is abundantly. The word abundant means bountiful and plentiful. This is God’s vision of how we should live our lives. God desires that we live prosperous lives, and we can’t do that if we are stuck doing the same things. We need to remember that God never duplicated a moment or a memory in time, so we should all strive to do the same.