Andrew Barber is the RUF Campus Minister at Northwestern University.
The Invisible Contract
I believe that most students who come to Northwestern have signed an invisible contract: grind harder than you ever imagined possible for several years and then get the dream job you always wanted.
I have seen enough to know that this is not specific to Northwestern. But this invisible contract hangs over most every NU student’s head. When they see competent NU peers graduate and fail to get the big job, or when they hear of friends back home who went to “less prestigious” schools and still ended up in good jobs, the invisible contract is threatened. Is this a good deal? Am I grinding for nothing?
A surprising number of my 1-on-1s are with students who just seem tired of “running the academic race.” These are conscientious, hard-working students who would quickly say that they have a great community in RUF and have grown spiritually. In so many ways, they have had an amazing college experience. Yet they still wonder if “all of this” is worth it; especially if they are taking on debt for their education.
Multiple times a quarter, I sit across from a student and ask, “so what are your plans for the summer/next year?” and they start crying. The pressure is immense.
For the record: I think Northwestern is a really good school. Students can get a fantastic education here. And when I speak to graduates from 2016-2020 about the anxiety my students face, they are surprised to hear about it. While they worked hard, they didn’t seem to have the same level of anxiety about their education and their future.
Anxious Students Making Decisions with Jesus
There are thousands of reasons why this might be the case, but at the core, I believe that students are desperate for a financially secure, emotionally satisfying future built upon their vocation. That sounds simple enough. But there is strange belief undergirding this desire: “If I make the right decisions, I can live a life without regret or insecurity.” For Christians, this often means that they spend a lot of time being anxious about their future, praying some, and waiting for God to strike them with lightning and give them this “right decision.”
Experience teaches us the truth, however: every person has regrets. Every person walks through insecurity.
Certainly there are examples in the Scriptures of God directly telling people what to do. Many of you have experienced this in your own lives. And yet, even in those situations, obedience always requires wisdom, trust, and dealing with potential regret. Every door we walk through requires closing others.
This has been my answer for these students: “I am less interested in you finding the right answer and more interested in your growing in wisdom. I don’t want you to make cold, abstract decisions, I want you to trust Jesus more. I don’t want you to live in fear of regret, I want you to know the one to whom you can bring your regrets.” As 1 Thessalonians 4:3 puts it: “For this is the will of God: your sanctification“.
This is why, barring situations where they must repent of outright sin, I don’t tell students what to do. I tell them who to trust and how to invite him into their decision-making process. Surprise, surprise: the answer to the academic treadmill is not a technique, as Alan Noble might say it, but the person of Jesus. We don’t avoid the hard things in life by making the right decisions (often the right decisions are the hard things!), we walk through the hard things of life with our Savior walking before us and with us.
There are many reasons for our explosive growth in RUF this year (we now interact with around 150 particular students every week), but it does raise some questions: why would a ministry that sings a lot of old hymns, talks about sin, and meets in an old chapel, experience crazy growth?
I suspect it is because you cannot come to a Large Group at RUF without hearing the truth: “The gospel is not about what you do, but about who you are in Christ.” We tell an old story that takes the tragedies in our lives and walks them to the cross on Calvary, where a bleeding but triumphant Savior cries “It is Finished!”
Our only hope in life and death is that we are not our own, but belong, body and soul, to Jesus. That is true for my students, and that is true of you as well.