Capstone Vocation - My Adventure at Spu - Reflection Essay

My adventure at SPU has really changed me and my personal viewpoints quiet a bit over the last two years. I was very tentative to have to take the university requirements when deciding to come here. I did not come from a very strong Christian background, in fact the only time I would get to go to church was when I either had a car to take myself or get to go with my girlfriend and he family. When I walked into my first university requirement class I really did not know what to expect, if they were going to judge me for not knowing as much, or if my grades would be affected because of my lack of knowledge coming in. I quickly found out that there was no require knowledge to start school at SPU and the people that went to the school did not judge me based on it. So needless to say needless to say there was a lot of change when it came to my understanding of God. I also learned a lot about myself, and the way that things work in the world through the business school.

Firstly my understanding of God was completely different then when I started my time at Seattle Pacific University. When I started at SPU I considered myself a Christian regardless of the fact that I didn't go to Church on a regular basis. Although I still do not go to Church on a regular basis and I still consider myself a Christian I have a very different view on what that means. I use to believe that the simple fact that you believe in God makes you a Christian but I really don't think that is the case. To be a Christian you must live your life a certain way. That does not mean that you have to go to church every Sunday or you have to pray a certain amount of times throughout the week. It means that you have to live realizing that your actions effect more than just yourself and that you should live your life the way that the Holy Spirit would want you to live it. This is not to be thought as guidelines but more of and encouragement and that you would want to live your life and positively affect those around you in the best possible way.

When it comes to the way that I think about the world I have changed a lot of my outlooks. Some of my classes, Ethics in particular, made me think about how things are being done around the world and if I would do those same things if I was in the same position. I have started to realize the difference in the way a Christian business does things in comparison to how a Non-Christian business would go about things. There is also a huge difference in whether a not a business acts morally when closing deals or within their factories or not. One of the examples we talked about in class was whether or not you should by diamonds by the way they are mined. Would you buy a diamond that was mind by slaves and done inhumanly or would you make sure the diamond was mined from employees that have the proper health care and wages? I have started asking myself these questions in my every day life and I find myself on both sides of the fence and do understand the reasons why some people would think one way versus the other. So I think that me questioning these things in the world would be the biggest difference in how I view the world, and also that I noticed that I have made choices in my everyday life based on those questions. Decisions that would have gone the other way if I had not asked myself if I would rather pay a little more to go through a company that is a little bit more ethical.

I think that the things I have learned about myself are the most important things that I have learned during my time at SPU. There have been a lot of things that have been put into prospective for me in my everyday life. The way I looked at things when I am at work, as a server at Joey on Lake Union, have changed such as how I think people should be treated whether they are employees or customers. I took a Spirituality in Business class and one of the sections was type of power, and I started to look at the ways power were used in my workplace. We have some employees that are at times shift leaders and then they are also normal servers some days. When they have the power of shift leaders there are some people that over abuse their hard power multiple times throughout the day. It is obvious to me what they are doing and how things should be done because of some of the lessons that I have learned while in the business school but for those people that don't have the same educational background they don't really know how to deal with it. Another thing that I have learned in the last two years at Seattle Pacific is patience, I have started to realize that as a I get older a lot of the things I am doing take more of