Two-plus lessons for Bethel University graduates
Maybe we already carry stories of our own that will guide us out of the bubble. Here’s mine.
By Jared Martinson | Writer
When I was in junior high and high school, I went on mission trips every summer all around the country. These trips lasted one week, a week devoted to local community service and strengthening bonds within our own groups. All of my best friends were next to me on these journeys to places like Wind River, Wy., where we were swallowed by a Native American pow-wow; Buffalo, N.Y., the closest I’ve ever been to Canada; Nashville, Tenn., home of country music and the coolest baseball cap I’ve ever owned; and Taylorsville, N.C., where we played a game in the car counting how many houses had overhead awnings attached instead of garages for their vehicles.
I have stories to share from all of these travels that might be relatable, or funny, or sad, or inspirational. Those characteristics usually make for good graduation speech content.
But just one of them taught me everything I needed to grasp when it came to how to respond to life’s challenges.
But I was always a positive, encouraging kid; smiling and complimenting friends in the hallways at school, cheering for the varsity basketball team when I sat in the last seat on the bench, the like. Why would I think anything other than happiness could be on someone’s mind if I had never been truly sad?
The town of Cortez, Co. has a population of 8,700 and holds claim to the title of “poorest city in Colorado”. Dusty roads welcomed our two 15-passenger vans in 2013 for a week of dry heat and a standard of living like us suburban kids had never seen before.
Growing up for me had been easy. Not experiencing anything life-changing between waking up and going to sleep every day made me oblivious to hardship. The city of Maple Grove catered to my skin color, my religious beliefs and the bed I slept in every night. “Demographic” was an uncommon word in the Twin Cities west metro vocabulary. But I was always a positive, encouraging kid; smiling and complimenting friends in the hallways at school, cheering for the varsity basketball team when I sat in the last seat on the bench, the like. Why would I think anything other than happiness could be on someone’s mind if I had never been truly sad?
That week in Cortez I saw exactly what had been avoiding me: poverty, loneliness, hunger, lack of care and tears. The kids we played with at the daycare eagerly gathered for their only meal of the day. They longed for high fives and hugs and for somebody to notice them for once. The houses we painted, like Juan’s, hadn’t been touched up in decades. The elderly homeowners couldn’t do the labor themselves or afford to hire it out. But they did buy us donuts and apple juice for our lunch breaks.
This livelihood shocked me. I was about to enter a new world myself, moving to high school that fall, and I suddenly wasn’t so worried about fitting into white suburbia popularity ranks after bumping elbows with people in the situations I observed in the southwest corner of Colorado.
So the first lesson is this: know your role and be humble. All of us have some kind of pride we hold to that drowns out the opportunity for someone else’s valuable voice to be heard. If I wallowed in my stress for who to stand with between classes at Maple Grove High School, I would have missed the everyday struggles that find their ways to poverty-stricken places like Cortez. Learn when to be quiet and listen.
This man coached me in basketball for five years, drove us to practices and paid for my meals when he didn’t have to, and exposed me to Beavis and Butt-Head episodes that a sixth-grader definitely did not understand.
At the end of that week in Cortez, our group went to a church service and the pastor opened up time at the end for personal prayer and blessing from him and our team leaders. So all of us teenagers got vulnerable and revealed the deeper corners of our hearts, which led to lots of crying; but it was a good cry, an enlightening cry, an “I needed to get that off my chest” cry.
So during the post-service root beer floats, with laughter and singing and dancing filling the room, I began to get complacent in my satisfaction with what life had thrown at me — nothing bad could happen now, everything I’ve been through is still all good in the end!
The laughter stopped when my mom’s phone rang.
My best friend’s dad was mowing the lawn that day and died of a heart attack. This man coached me in basketball for five years, drove us to practices and paid for my meals when he didn’t have to, and exposed me to Beavis and Butt-Head episodes that a sixth-grader definitely did not understand. He was my second father.
And I was 1,200 miles away, unable to grieve with the others who had been so impacted by him, unable to fully grasp that he was gone, and I wouldn’t be hearing his gruff-but-loving “Jared, tell Reed he’s a jackass for me” remark anymore.
Up until that Wednesday night in the basement of a church occurred, I thought I had it all: the girl I’d been pursuing for two years was finally my girlfriend, I was poised to make the JV basketball team as a sophomore and the freedom of high school was around the corner.
But that phone call showed me the second lesson: I’m not invincible. The highest and greatest moments of your life are not invincible. I was ready to go home and bring everything I’d seen into my day-to-day routine. My perfect record of avoiding tragedy and sadness was tarnished with that phone call from home, and from that point on, I had to be ready.
I’ll leave you with one more thing, something that I didn’t learn in the poorest city in Colorado, but is important nevertheless. I learned this lesson for three straight years here during my own career at Bethel University, a career that is not yet completed. It came to a pinnacle in an essay writing class — a class held at 7:40 a.m. three days a week because the professor forgot to reserve a more humanizing time slot before the deadline.
I did not want to go to this class at 7:40 a.m. three days a week. Driving 17 miles to get to school would make it feel even earlier. And it was challenging, writing something new every single day, anything at all, attempting to be vulnerable when I was only 53 minutes removed from my alarm clock ringing in my ears. Hell, I didn’t even need the class for my major!
But therein lies the lesson: give of yourself, and you will be rewarded beyond the tangible. The best way to write essays well, the professor said, is to give of yourself. The reader wants an inside look and that will keep them reading your story. The same goes for the world we interact with each day. Put yourself out there. Take a risk. The right readers will stick around for the end of the story. I gave my Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings to this essay writing class, and though my skill improved, I cared about something deeply despite the lack of initial benefit to me personally. There’s reward hidden there.
Bottom line, Bethel University graduates? Take a look around every once in a while. Understand you won’t win ’em all. Go sacrifice something of yourself.
