At least once a day, someone asks me a very annoying question: what am I doing after I graduate in May?
To spare anyone out there the trouble of asking me again anytime soon, here’s my answer: I still don’t know. Still, I hope the next few weeks will help me get a clue, beginning with a trip that starts today.
For the fourth straight year, I’ll have the privilege of traveling with a group of fellow students to small towns in Mexico to try to meet some practical needs. Some students will set up medical clinics, some will do minor construction and some will play with children. These are simple things, really, but they teach us lessons about what really matters and convey, in a concrete sense, the message of grace we hope to carry within ourselves.
Yet though I’ve been a few times before, this trip comes in a fresh context for me. With graduation looming, I’m still trying to figure out what to do with my life.
This fact probably scares my parents as much as it scares me. And yet I am somewhat relieved — and alternately horrified — by the number of my peers who are in the same situation. Perhaps we are a lost generation, or perhaps this is a normal thing. It’s hard to say at this point.
I find it funny that I might be so foolish to think of myself as having it all together. Indeed, those of us going to Mexico are truly to be pitied if we go in the mindset of anything less than humility. What have I, as a college student fumbling for direction in life, to teach those who in their poverty, sickness and longing know more about real life than I may ever know?
This is not to say the Mexicans we are visiting live in misery. In fact, what has impressed me the most on my previous trips is the palpable joy of the faithful in spite of – or perhaps because of – the lack of many of the modern conveniences I take for granted. I wonder whether I am capable of truly grasping this, then, that joy might exist apart from the trinkets and treasures that fill my life.
I wonder about this because it seems we worry so much about our career paths. We fear that even with all the work we put toward getting a college degree, we might still end up working a low-wage job with few prospects for advancement. I suspect our worries, at their most basic level, are grounded in a deep fear of failure, poverty, discomfort and suffering.
Perhaps we young Americans fear suffering because we know nothing of it. Or, more precisely, we know nothing of the kind of suffering that can’t be numbed by an anti-depressant narcotic.
And so physical and material suffering, those great unknowns, scare the daylights out of us. In our constant pursuit of the perfect and the comfortable, we have ignored the deep value in suffering. In his book “The Problem of Pain,” C.S. Lewis had our generation pegged 40 years before we were born:
“[T]he evil results of pain can be multiplied if sufferers are persistently taught by the bystanders that such results are the proper and manly results for them to exhibit. Indignation at others’ sufferings, though a generous passion, needs to be well managed lest it steal away patience and humility from those who suffer and plant anger and cynicism in their stead.”
To be sure, there are those in our age who “get it” about suffering. This past February, writer Peggy Noonan recalled in a column her opportunity to attend an audience of Pope John Paul II 18 months earlier. John Paul II, she said, had things to teach us through his suffering.
In him we saw one of the great philosophical and spiritual lights of the 20th century endure an arduous decline. His body failed him, even as his mind and soul remained strong. He pressed on to show us suffering was not a part of the human experience to be avoided, but a part of the human experience – period.
And then there are the nameless thousands who live without the protection of the most basic human right: the right to worship freely. Though the recent case of Abdul Rahman, the Afghan Christian who endured calls for his death under Islamic law before finding asylum in Europe, has received much attention, there are many more who endure the same kind of persecution every day.
And here I am, “suffering” under the weight of a career choice. Perhaps I will be fortunate enough to remember the names of John Paul II and Abdul Rahman as I go to Mexico, and perhaps I will be ready to learn more from the people I will meet there than I can possibly teach them.
Our trip will end on Good Friday, a holiday whose name surely strikes a discordant note in our age. Yet the example of the suffering that took place on the very first Good Friday still persists as a reminder that true redemption can only come through pain.
It’s a shame, then, that we’re so bent on avoiding discomfort. We might learn something about life if we’d only allow ourselves to be hurt – and healed.
 
Josh is a mass communication senior. Contact him at [email protected]