 Hi everybody, I'm Don Sweeting, President of Colorado Christian University, and it's my joy to welcome you to CCU. We're so glad you're here. To those who are new, we welcome you for the very first time. We've been praying for you, we've been dreaming about this day, and we're thrilled to have you as part of this community. For those of you who are coming back, staff and faculty, we've missed you and we're glad you're here. I know many of you have been working really, really hard to get things ready for this day. I'm so grateful for all the work that's gone into it in this unusual season. I've got to tell you though, one of the best sites in the world, the most wonderful sites, the most wonderful thing I've seen in the past few days is to have students back on campus. It just hasn't been the same without you here. And welcome to a new season, a key season in your life. You might have heard about a lumberjack who was asked if you had only five minutes to chop down a tree, what would you do? And the lumberjack wisely replied, I would take two and a half minutes of that five minutes to sharpen my axe. In other words, you can be a strong lumberjack, but if you don't have a sharp axe, good luck. You're not going to accomplish very much. The students, you're entering a season of preparation. We're going from summer to fall, yeah, we're going through a season of pandemic. We can't wait to get to the other side. I think we're getting close, but you're now in a season of preparation. You don't have to put that on hold. Here we go. Whether you're ready or not, and preparation is so important. I want to affirm you in your choice to be here. I remember hearing Billy Graham interviewed in the last years of his life and someone said, if you could do it all over again, you know, this great evangelist who had preached the gospel to more people than anybody else in history, if you could do it all over again, what would you do? And do you know what he said? He said, I would have spent more time preparing. I didn't study enough. That's from Billy Graham. Amazing. I have a friend in Orlando who's the vice president of the Orlando Magic, Pat Williams. He's written a lot of books and we were talking, he gave me one of his recent books. The title was the winning combination keys for coaching and leadership. Now I was a pastor, but I'm interested in leadership. So I read the book and one of the things he said in that book is the secret to great coaches and great teams is that they are fantastically prepared. That's what makes the difference. Preparation. It's so important. This is your season of preparation and we're glad you're here. We're glad to be a part of it. And for us, this is our season to prepare you for what God is calling you to be. What a privilege that is. I don't know if you're aware of it, but there is so much confusion in American higher education about the purpose of college. I mean, the purpose of college has been lost. It's hard to get anybody to articulate clearly what they're trying to do. For some, the purpose of college is, you know, well, we want to help people get a job and that's valid or to help people think critically, that's valid too. Or they've got lots of other things on their agenda about what they want to do. We look at it a little different at Colorado Christian University. The purpose of a Christ-centered education is different. It involves these other things, but it goes so much deeper. It involves, first of all, being a place where you can seek truth and knowledge. Unlike some universities, we believe in truth. We prize the truth. We want you to know it, to discover it, to become seekers of truth. And then secondly, we want this to be a place where you can gain wisdom, where you grow wise. You grow wise in receiving the best of the past and the best of the present and you have a deeper understanding of the order of God's world and reality. Thirdly, we also want this to be a place that shapes your character, where you become men and women of substance. People of integrity, where there's a wholeness and your heart starts to be reshaped and you start to love what is good and true and right and there's a new order in your life that is only explained by the environment and the community you're part of that has now shaped you. And then finally, we want this to be a place where you can grow deep in your faith in Jesus Christ, to be grounded in that faith. I think of Jesus as, well, he is the rock upon which our lives are built. He is our wisdom. He is the truth. He is the righteous one. And the passage that comes to my mind is Matthew 7, where Jesus says, everyone who hears these words of mine and does them, he'll be like the wise men who built his house on a rock. And when the trouble comes, the rain, the floods, the pandemics and everything else, it doesn't fall apart, but there's a resilience and you stand because you're standing on something solid. Friends, we're so thrilled that you're here. It's our joy to welcome you to this community, to welcome you to this place of learning for this adventurous preparation as you get ready to prepare for your calling. It's our joy to welcome you to the 107th year of Colorado Christian University. So buckle up, get ready. It's going to be an adventure and we're in it with you and we can't wait to see what God does in your life through Colorado Christian University.