The Hope We Profess

I had lunch for the second time with a student named Jacob today and we talked extensively about The Bridge to Terabithia, the Game Show Network, and how HE would arrange the stage if he had his own game show, among other things...

But I needed this conversation.

Because among those other things was a conversation about why he often feels he has no hope for his future and about the burdens and pressures that all East Asian students face during his season of life.

Jacob is a believer who spent several years in Houston as a child while his dad worked on projects there but has spent the last five or so years in Asia, his family often moving from city to city - somewhere around 10 moves in all, including one to America and a return trip home a few years later.

But he also seems to be one of the saddest, most hopeless people I know. Part of that is his lazy demeanor, but not most of it.

As he listed off all of the problems that he's facing and all of the pressures and burdens that have been put on him, I asked if there's anything that he looks forward to when he wakes up in the morning, or what motivates him to get out of bed.

The short answer - the weekend.

But he also took me back to his final year of high school and described a typical day for me:

6:00am - School starts
5:00pm - 7:00pm - Some kind of test, which they had DAILY
7:00pm - Go home to eat dinner and st-.......(study)
7:15pm - Fall asleep because he's too exhausted to do anything else
3:00am - Wake up to do his homework before class starts again

*Add to that a final test at the end of the year that determines his major, job, and to some extent, social status and well-being for the rest of his life, and repeat for the entire school-year.

--------------------------

I was absolutely blown away. I had heard that the final year of high school before the big test was crazy, but not THIS crazy.

Some students will repeat their final year of high school (with the type of schedule described above) one or two more times in order to try to get a better score and get into a better school or major. It's kind of like the career tests we took in 3rd grade, just for fun, to see what kinds of jobs we might be interested in. At the end we were told something like a policeman, clown, or lawyer, but none of it was for real.

His sister who is in SECOND GRADE goes to bed at midnight every night because it takes her that long to finish all of the homework assigned. Kids don't get to be kids and go run around outside or learn how to play sports or musical instruments, they're pounded into the ground by a severely flawed educational system.

The real tragedy in all of this comes after these students have graduated from high school and taken their final test.

Soon after, students like Jacob realize that college isn't all that it was made out to be and they're STILL under a ton of pressure and have hours and hours of classes each day.

He wakes up and thinks that it is all pointless and that all of the hard work that came before this was for nothing. Jobs are hard to come by, he hates the random foreign language that they stuck him with, and there's not much to look forward to.

After awhile of talking about this kind of stuff, he started asking the questions.

"What gets YOU out of bed in the morning? Why do YOU have hope? Do you have any goals or dreams in life?"

I told him about how, even though I wasn't nearly as busy as he was and still had a lot of fun and good things in my life, that school wasn't all that different for me. You wake up for 18 years of your life and go through the same routine every single day, maybe looking forward to a football game you get to go to or a concert in a month. I told him that it was HARD. Days are monotonous, going through the same thing day in and day out, and for what? I told him I often wondered why there was hope or what my purpose in life was beyond those walls.

And then I told him, that even now as a Christian, here in East Asia, there are still boring days and boring weeks, there's not always something big to look forward to in the immediate future.

Like right now, it's REALLY hard to be here because I know I get to go home in 35 days and I just want to be home and with my family and girlfriend.

But I told him, even then, I believe that there is hope and the possibility of experiencing joy every single day. God is everywhere and we need only to keep our eyes out for Him to experience Him in the smaller details of our lives. I told him that I get out of bed every morning, even if I think it might be a boring day because I truly believe, that EVERY SINGLE DAY, God has something in store for me. A classmate or friend that I can encourage, being able to tell someone about God, loving my family or girlfriend, etc, AND that every day, God wants to change me or to teach me something, and I want to be open to that.

I explained that I had NO IDEA what JOB I'd end up having even a year from now, but that I want 2 things to be true of me at the end of my life.

1) I'd rather have $10 in my bank account when I die and for people to have felt loved by me than to have $10 million and be a successful career person, only to not give a rip about people. I want my life to be about loving people, serving people, giving people food that need food, healing people that have diseases, giving shelter to those that have none, and so on.

2) I want to help people realize their full potential of what God has in store for them. People are talented and gifted in so many different ways and God wants to USE those things and give us purpose and fulfillment in life in the process. Like you, Jacob, it might not seem like there's hope, but God wants to use YOU, and your gifts for language and writing to love people and serve Him and tell others about Him.

Jacob responded, "Wow, that's very inspirational. Like a speech or something. I will try to remember your words."

I'd like to think that Jacob left our two-hour conversation in the coffee shop at least a little bit encouraged and with more hope for his future than he came in with, but who knows.

But if nothing else, I needed to have that conversation even for myself. Maybe it was just as much for me as it was for him.

To remind myself WHY I'm here and why I love and care about these people and to see and hopefully share in their worries and burdens. To be filled with compassion for Jacob and students like him.

To remind myself that EVERY DAY, there is hope, and there's a reason to choose JOY even when my circumstances would dictate otherwise. God wants to do things in and through me every single day. Am I going to let Him or am I going to "take the day off" because I'm looking forward to something else further ahead?

And to remind myself of the vision I feel like God's given me for my own life. I have no idea where that will take me, but I'm excited to be along for the ride!

"Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful." -Hebrews 10:23

-CK