Where Will You Be in 10,000 Years?

This past week we held a campus wide survey-outreach campaign called the "10,000 Year Survey". It simply was a 9 question survey that sought to engage the campus community in a healthy conversation about personal opinions about life after death. Every person has views and opinions about such a subject, but what we have found is that most people don't take the time to discuss their opinions about. The university campus is a great place to have discussions like such. It really was a fun week of dialoguing with college students and faculty about what they thought. Each and every survey was submitted into a hopper for a chance at several gift certificates to iTunes Music Store. Also, every question was tallied to get an overall view of where people were at. I had several wonderful and friendly conversations with students myself. What I found was that people hold all kinds of views, but many of the views are more like reactions to the questions rather than thoughful. What I mean is that many students would contradict themselves all over the survey. Many people would answer based on what emotion they experienced from the question too. What one notices is that every person has opinions on such things like the afterlife, but take very little time to investigate if there own opinions are reasonable and coherent as a whole body of work. For example, a common opinion was that students believed that they would share the afterlife with friends and family, but at the same time suggest that we probably will just ceast to exist! Huh? On another strange note, I was sort of shocked to hear how popular reincarnation seems to be amongst college students these days. It was sort of sad to think. All in all, it was a fun week to get out there and have some fun conversations with students. Our students loved it, and we counted over 600 surveys were completed! They want to know when we can do something like that again. Now comes the tricky part in teaching them that they can do it ANY TIME they want....they just have to open their mouths and be a loving and kind witness wherever they are at.