Fear and Community, and the Power of Prayer

For those of you who don't know, last night (Sunday) was the first worship service with Foot of the Cross, the student-led worship ministry here on campus. It was outside, a beautiful warm evening on the steps of the library with a small band, a nice big gathering of students, and of course our lovely Student Chaplain, Kelsey. I'll be perfectly honest: I went mostly to support Kelsey, both personally and in her campus ministry, and also because a lot of my friends were going and I didn't have anything better to do. It's not that I hate worship, but I'd gone to church once already, and two in one day is a bit much - even for a pastor's daughter. (The horror!)

So, the first bit was good, a tad loud at first but nice: your typical worship set with some really great keyboarding by Pearce's worship leader Tim, and a faaaaaaabulous lead singer whose name I don't know yet but will hopefully find out. She was amazing, especially with the smoky, jazzy rendition of an old-hat "nineties worship song" (you know the ones). I wasn't regretting going, exactly, but I wasn't really super into it.

Then the first set ended, and Kelsey came out to introduce the next thing: a time of prayer and contemplation, whether in groups or alone - but to change it up, she'd provided chalk for us to write our requests and struggles anonymously on the cement in front of the library steps. One option was to trace our handprint wherever we'd written down our prayers, and other people could come and put their hands over it while they prayed for our need.

At first I was like, "Aww, that's cute, that'll be a fun way to go around and pray for people in community and connect physically as well as symbolically."

Then I wrote down my prayer request and started bawling.

Well, I had two, and it was really the second that got me. The first was regarding my dear friend who is going to serve in Romania for nine months once she graduates in December. Then another came to me, like it was dropped into my lap: I don't know where I'm going after school. Handprint.

There was something about that handprint that made it, suddenly, intensely personal. I'm sure I'm not the only one thinking that, especially among my junior and senior friends who haven't quite solidified (or even thought about) their post-graduation plans. And as I scrawled it out in bold capitals, traced my hand (which, with chalk, turned out rather fat with stubby, disproportionately tiny fingers), and stepped away, it became strangely anonymous: as if someone else had written it, and I'd turned around to see it just there, perfectly formed and speaking straight into my heart.

I didn't realize until that moment the depth of my fear. As children raised at the turn of the century, we are used to having our lives planned out for us. It's a formula perfectly designed for success until now, post-recession and still struggling: preschool, kindergarten, first through twelfth grade, graduate with good grades and maybe some good AP scores, take your SAT, go to college, get a 4.0 (or as near as you can), graduate.

Fifty years ago, boom. Instant job. Or at least, a direct path to follow, guided to a perfectly packaged life: career, spouse, kids, dog, house, car, white picket fence. The American Dream.

Now, there are no certainties. There are plenty of people writing about the millenials, about those people coming into their own in a post-Postmodern, economically struggling society: my generation. I won't rehash it. But I will quote one person, a girl around my age, responding via email to a Reader's Digest article an issue or so back that talked about how we, the millenials, are "rewriting the rules for success."

From where I stand, there is no success. Only survival. 

I don't know where I'm going after school. Standing there looking at my confession, bright pink and all caps on the ground at my feet, I realized how scared I really was. All advice, senior year excitement, and grad school researching aside, there is great fear in not knowing what comes next. All my life, I've followed the prescribed route as much as I could - and this is where the ocean falls off the edge of the earth, and there are no more landmarks.

I thought that was bad. Then, people started praying for it. I went around, doing my own hand thing on other requests - some anonymous, others not so much - and out of the corner of my eye, person after person knelt and put their hands on the words I had written and brought them before God. It was no longer my burden. It belonged to them, to all of us, this fear: the fear brought by the end of the road and the beginning of wilderness.

In chapel today, Dr. Paul Stewart said something like "Roberts tells you that coming here will give you everything you need to succeed" in probably the most sarcastic manner I've ever heard someone recommend an education. (If you didn't go to chapel, you missed out.) The truth is, Roberts may give us an education, may set us on the path to wisdom, but that doesn't guarantee "success" as Americans have traditionally understood it.

I can do without the white picket fence and the 2.5 kids, but I'd still like to have some idea of what comes next, and the not knowing is far scarier than I realized until I actually wrote it down. I'm a writer by nature: the words I put down "become flesh" in a near-biblical way, finding life and truth from the very act of laying them down next to one another. When I wrote those words, they were manifested in a way they hadn't been before, revealing themselves to me as a burden that I didn't fully realize I was carrying.

The cool part is, I'm not the only one carrying it now. Writing it down, giving it up to others and to God, spread out the weight of it and made it easier to bear. I had my little crying jag, along with about half the people in attendance, and we came together and comforted each other. Life is full of uncertainties: just looking at the writing scrawled in multicolored chalk in front of the library steps made that clear to me. This generation has some crazy times ahead of it as we test the waters, fighting to survive, to succeed, to be someone. That fight, I think, will be one of the most important and most life-changing things we ever do. What comes after is up to God.

To that girl who wrote in with her chilling statement, I would say this: maybe, in this new era, survival is success. Let's keep our heads above water, ladies and gentlemen, and see where this year takes us.

In Which I Become SALTy

I am not a people person.

That's not to say I hate people (although I do, sometimes - but generally as a whole, in a love-the-sinner-hate-the-sin kind of way). I actually think people are pretty cool, in all our crazy diversity and different ways of processing the world. But I'm also an introvert, and for a long time, I let that define the way I interact with others and the way I view my own social sphere.

Coming into Roberts Wesleyan College as a freshman, a lot of that was turned upside down. I was living on campus in a dorm with my best friend and twenty-two other girls, and I was surrounded constantly by others: in classes, in chapel, at mealtimes, or just walking down the path to the next item on my agenda. At the time, it was an epiphany, a bit of a coming-out-of-my-shell moment.

Then sophomore year rolled around, I moved back home to save money, and everything regressed. I let my early morning work hours and my five-minute separation from campus restrict me, dividing me from campus life and everything that was going on with my friends, with events and clubs and general college life. In a lot of ways it felt like I was even more introverted than before, seizing onto my own natural inclination to retreat and bow out of responsibilities, out of public appearances, out of any kind of varied social life. My focus was purely academic, and while academia is always a good thing, without the tempering environment of what "college life" really is, in all its varying guises, I was missing out on a lot - spiritually, socially, and emotionally.

Don't get me wrong - it wasn't the new commuter status that was separating me from the college environment and community. It was my own reluctance to meet new people, embrace new experiences, and really get everything out of my college years that I could.

Last spring, my friend Brittany (another Brittany - they just seem to flock to me) hosted one of her annual campfire/swimming parties for our group of friends. It had expanded a little bit since I'd last hung out with them, and now included a girl I knew vaguely from a few previous gatherings - a transfer student from Alaska, of all places, who was super friendly and outgoing and apparently didn't require a two-year holding period before metaphorically embracing me as a new friend, as I sometimes feel I do. Somehow or another she'd discovered I liked to write, and before I knew it I was agreeing to apply for a position on the Beacon staff, the RWC student-run newspaper.

Whaaaaaaat. Involvement? Social... interaction? Being a... a LEADER, what is that?! Being on SALT? I couldn't even remember the words that went into that flavorful anagram (it's Student Association Leadership Team, I'm now aware).

A few weeks later, I got the email telling me I had been selected to be the Assistant Editor, under my new friend Victoria as Editor-in-Chief. For the entire summer, I didn't let myself think about it. I was excited to be working on a project like the Beacon with two people I knew would make an awesome team, but I was nervous about being on SALT, a very visual team on campus that interacts with tons of people and essentially helps foster the community at RWC. So, no thoughts. None. The occasional email and text regarding the Beacon or SALT were mere blips on my radar screen.

Then, suddenly, it was the penultimate week of August and it was time to start training week. I hiked to campus with my enormous purple backpack in much trepidation, uncertain of what to expect and terrified of all the new people and weird activities that I figured would be par for the "team building" course. (I wasn't wrong, but I really didn't have any reason to be worried).

Upon approaching the bus, shadowing a few of my friends who were also on SALT, I was faced almost immediately with an unfamiliar kid in a baseball cap who, in almost any other setting, I would immediately label as "dodgy trouble-maker who's always late to class" - and he introduced himself, asked my name, my year, was I on SALT, welcome to the team et cetera. The friendliest, most welcoming dude I've ever met, and I'd been ready to clam up and profile him entirely unfairly. (I might have been right about the trouble-making part, but it's all in good fun.)

The rest of those few days, spent at Lighthouse Christian Camp, were simultaneously the longest and shortest days of my life. They were packed with sunshine and lounging by the lake, hilarious games that broke the ice and put me at ease, and - most importantly - a group of people that I foresee will quickly become some of the best friends I'll make in college. By Tuesday, packing our stuff to return to Roberts, I was deeply regretting that I'd waited until my senior year to become truly involved and invested in my own college experience and the experiences of others.

I'll be honest: I wasn't looking forward to my senior year. All I saw ahead of me was hard work, the endless planning and drudgery of commuting (even if I am closer nowadays), and the big scary finality of graduating and have no concrete plans for where to go after that. I still see hard work, but now it's in conjunction with others who will support me and work with me in our various tasks, both shared and solo. I still see the mildly annoying requirements of commuting, but now I have a bike and a community on campus I'm eager to get to and be a part of. I still see graduation, a red letter day in May marked on my massive day planner that's already scarily full of dates and details, but now the time between here and there is an amazing lineup of opportunities, developing friendships, and crazy adventures that will, I believe, have a positive and long-lasting impact on who I am and where I fit into the fabric of this world.

This was a deep one, guys. Sorry. But in the process of one weekend, I feel like my entire set of priorities shifted and solidified, and I'm excited about it. Introversion and shyness are no longer the deciding factors in my life; they don't define me, and I won't let them become my weaknesses. Instead I'm going to cultivate a love of working with other people and being part of a huge social and academic community, and not let myself stumble into the trap of sealing myself from the outside world. Right now, RWC is my family, and I'm looking forward to helping support and nourish it in the unique ways that I can bring to the table.

Today, one of our SALTy folks, Randie, gave an awesome devotional on 1 Corinthians 12:15-26, which talks about the importance of the parts of the body (of Christ) and how they fit together/need each other, even though they're all different. I think I'm finally ackowleging my part in the RWC body. It's gonna be a great year.