Week 11: Blogging

Time: 04/12-04/18, 19 hours

Topics: A Christian Perspective on the Insurance Industry.

Tools: Netlify, GitHub, Prismic, Gatsby.

Summary:

Life in Canada was blurring by at this point. I became familiar with the neighborhood on the long photo walks I took each day at sunset. This week I finally baked sourdough successfully using my new starter named Remy.

I took a week off from internship work to focus on my classes but I was back on the 12th to help get Wunderite ready for the Techstars virtual demo day on the 28th. The marketing site needed a fresh 'About' and 'Press' page and the ‘Awards' section needed to be updated. Using the exact workflow I used to build The Pub website, I added the two pages quite easily. They are live and you can check them out here and here. 

This week I also started building this blog. In order to get credit for my internship, I needed to submit three 2 page reflections and a final 10 page paper on my internship. I wanted to showcase what I had learned during my internship and couldn’t find the motivation to write a paper. I did have the motivation to build another website however, so I made this.  The format of a blog seemed friendlier and more manageable to me, I could set daily writing goals for myself in terms of weekly posts and watch my website grow as I added content via Prismic. I was heavily inspired by Apelido & Apelido’s website. I liked how simple it was and I had been itching to take on a true brutalist layout ever since seeing the Balenciaga site a few months ago. 

The blog would be organized by weekly summaries that were tagged with topics and tools. This way I could tie each week to my thoughts on entrepreneurship, the insurance industry, and working remotely as well as my progress made with my favorite tools (Gatsby, Prismic, Netlify, Framer Motion, NPM, Laravel, Webflow, and GitHub). I wanted to take advantage of all I had learned this semester with Wunderite so this approach to my internship assignments made the most sense.

A Christian Perspective on the Insurance Industry: in Mathew 6, Jesus specifically urges his followers to not worry about everyday life. My favorite verse, verse 26, reads: “Look at the birds. They don’t need to plant or harvest or put food in barns because your heavenly Father feeds them. And you are far more valuable to Him than they are.” With this passage in mind, how can one make sense of the insurance industry? I think Dr. Hill’s thoughts on this ring true in today’s age of material norms and income increases. In his paper Can Money buy Happiness? Dr. Hill suggests that when we base the good life on material enjoyment, our wellbeing is “wrapped up in having more or less than...” rather than having enough (Hill, 27). He writes that the desire to accumulate and put hope in wealth as a source of security can lead us to lose faith in God’s providence but that there is a balanced way to enjoy God’s good gifts. He writes that expenditure which enhances relational ties with others is one way to live out this balance and that being generous and to "share whatever wealth we receive from God”.

Buying insurance is a way of pooling resources with others to benefit those in need. We should avoid purchasing it with attitudes of control and self-autonomy and remember to set our hope on God. A quote I found very helpful in understanding the insurance industry was in Dr. Hill’s paper: “The goal for every believer is to prepare in this present age for the coming age, and one of the best ways for the wealthy to do this is to share what they have with those who do not” (Hill, 29).