August every year is a time of new beginnings. This year, for the first time, I have both of my kids out of the house and off at college; Jesse started class already, and Sam starts in a couple weeks. Rolla K-12 schools (which no longer impact me directly) and Missouri S&T both start classes Monday. This past week was Opening Week, an orientation for incoming freshmen.
This is a fall like no others. Both Pitt (Jesse) and Brown (Sam) are starting the semester online, with plans to eventually have some in-person classes, such as labs. UNC Chapel Hill had students on campus for just over a week before sending them home. Missouri S&T is starting out hybrid; for my class, the in-person classroom only accommodates about 40% of the students, the rest of whom will be online.
Anxiety has been climbing for years. The CDC data are eight years out of date, but other sources indicate that the upward trend has continued. On top of that trend came the pandemic, protests against racial injustice, and partisan warfare over fundamental voting rights. Young people (and older people, too) are right to be anxious about the future.
In a workshop today, Rev. Rodger Nishioka encouraged us to use a disruption framework to understand the COVID-19 pandemic. That is, our lives have not simply been interrupted, after which we would go back to the way things were. Instead, our lives will be fundamentally changed. Even if we have a magical vaccine next month, the fear and distrust will remain; new ways of communicating, behaving, and planning our lives will remain.
And yet in the midst of all this uncertainty, I have reason for hope. Why? Well, there are a few proximate causes. First, Common Call Campus Ministry, and the rest of the partners in the Campus Ministries Association, had an awesome Murder Mystery event for incoming freshmen. Many students had a chance to hear what we’re about and expressed an interest in learning more. Second, a project I initiated, to provide some education and other resources for the LGBTQ+ community in Rolla, suddenly has some momentum behind it. Third, I suddenly have a few new research project opportunities on campus—no money in hand yet, but movement in the right direction.
More fundamentally, though, my hope comes from my past experience with adversity. Eight years ago, Rhonda had MS, but it hadn’t taken over her life yet. Then from December 2012 to sometime in 2014, she went through pure hell with facial pain, and the rest of us went through it with her. Yet we came out the other side, damaged but strengthened. I know my relationship with my kids is different now than it would have been otherwise. They had to grow up fast but rose to the occasion and are better people because of it.
Hope is not some rose-colored-glasses, wishful-thinking good feeling. True hope comes from adversity. When I was young, I was over-confident in my abilities and intellect. It took a little bit of failure to make me appreciate the need for hard work to back them up, but also to realize that a little bit of failure is OK. It’s OK to try something and fail, as long as you keep trying. It’s OK to encounter some setbacks, some roadblocks, some unsolvable problems. Maybe my life didn’t turn out the way I expected it to, and the path I took was not the straight path to success I would have chosen. Looking back, though, I realize that the problems I encountered along the way made me who I am, and that there is a good future for me somewhere out there, even if I can’t see it yet.
28 Do you not know?
Isaiah 40:28-31
Have you not heard?
The Lord is the everlasting God,
the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He will not grow tired or weary,
and his understanding no one can fathom.
29 He gives strength to the weary
and increases the power of the weak.
30 Even youths grow tired and weary,
and young men stumble and fall;
31 but those who hope in the Lord
will renew their strength.
They will soar on wings like eagles;
they will run and not grow weary,
they will walk and not be faint.
Hope comes from being weary, being weak, and even falling, yet continuing on. God gives me strength. This fall, I don’t know what will happen, whether Common Call and the LGBTQ+ program will take off or the pandemic will crush them. Yet I know that no matter what, I will learn something, and come out better on the other side, as I have before, with God’s help.