As a junior in college, I hear a lot of talk concerning the future and plans for next steps. Around campus lurks often a sense of urgency and uncertainty, and when students are honest, a lot of them face fear for the future on a regular basis.
I was rather surprised when I first arrived at Grove City College by how many of the faculty assumed I did not have a plan post-college – and by how many of the students exemplified in their actions why faculty made these assumptions. I had figured that students did not come to a place like Grove City without a mission. The truth of the matter is that few people have a game plan for the rest of their life at eighteen, and sometimes it is even less clear by age twenty-two.
As human beings made in the image of God, we all have an innate longing for home. There is a desire in each one of our hearts that yearns to return to the Garden – back to our beginnings and the perfection that accompanied work and relationship with God. Although sin entered the Garden and spoiled our perfect home, we were not left without a promise. This promise of restoration – of a new home that will eclipse even the Garden – is what we long for. Some have been blessed with amazing families and wonderful homes, and others experience this longing to an even deeper level as they emerge from broken homes and shattered or non-existent families. The beautiful truth of the Gospel is that we have been adopted into the perfect family of God through the spotless sacrifice of His obedient son. This adoption also comes with a home. It is a home we will be able to enjoy forever without the fear of evil or brokenness. We cannot know when we will arrive at this home – so as we wait, we make homes of our own.
College purportedly aims to prepare people to have a home and a means of sustaining it. College also imparts skills whereby people may better society and those around them. Where students run into trouble is in the abstraction of these aims. Where is the home? What will the means of support actually be? What is society? Who is even around you?
In Wendell Berry’s book What are People For?, his essay “Wallace Stegner and the Great Community” details a fellowship he participated in under Wallace Stenger’s instruction. Berry writes,
In those days I assumed, as my education had prepared me to assume, that I was going to follow a literary career that would lead me far from home. I assumed that I would teach (and write) in a university in a large city, and in fact I did so for a while. And then my family and I returned to my native county in Kentucky. That is, I became, in both habitat and subject, what is called a ‘regional writer.’
He later describes Wallace Stegner’s worth, saying, “As a regional writer he seems to me exemplary. He has worked strenuously to know his region… to him, as to many writers now, history was immediate experience. To Mr. Stegner, it is also memory.”
Many college students enter the university with a mindset similar to Berry’s. They leave home, choose a major that best fits their skill set, and hope they will eventually find a well-paying job and maybe settle down with a nice family, wherever they may be. As American students, we like to shoot high, and “high” aims often do not include the little town we grew up in.
Berry refers to this idea in another essay about Wallace Stegner, titled “Writer and Region.” Berry – quoting Stegner – writes, “For many, the whole process of intellectual and literary growth is a movement, not through or beyond, but away from the people and society they know best, the faiths they still at bottom accept, the little raw provincial world for which they keep an apologetic affection.” We create this idea in our heads that our success and the rest of our lives are waiting somewhere beyond – somewhere “away from.”
We do have a longing for something better. We long for a better home and a better family, but that fulfillment will not be achieved in this world.
God has carefully placed each one of us in a specific spot with certain people to love and care for. This is not to say that He could never call someone someplace else. The Church indeed needs people to leave their homes in order to spread the gospel to the ends of the earth. Many of us, though, need to ask what is driving our desire to move “away from” our given communities.
Additionally, we need to ask our communities what we can do to give back to them. Most certainly the place you grew up in was lacking in something. Maybe there was a lack of educators, nurses, or good lawyers. What kind of incredible impact could we make on our families and communities if we saw a need, studied a way to fill that need, and then brought our skills back to our homes and communities to enrich and bless them?
This will not be the path for all. But there is a deep beauty in coming home and loving the place of your birth. There is so much more meaning in your studies when you know who you are studying for. And there is much less room for uncertainty and fear when you enter college with a concrete goal and a true destination in mind.
Education is a wonderful gift, but it is up to us to faithfully use it to better our communities and love people. Wherever you currently call home, there are people who can benefit from your gifts. If you are looking for a better place to be, stop looking. Never underestimate the goodness of going home.
