Written by Aaron Boyer
“So where are you going to college?”
I think that’s a question most of us can relate to. Many Americans consider a college education almost essential, not just for personal and professional success, but also for passage into adulthood. Until you go off to college, take responsibility for your own actions, get smashed at parties, sleep around a little bit, pull an all-nighter… oh, sorry. Those last three weren’t expectations my family or I had for college, but I see those expectations in pop culture. Anyway, the point is that college is a big deal with lots of expectations surrounding it.
I am an idealist and a dreamer. If I were alive in the late 18th Century, I would have been classified as a member of the Romantic movement. In high school, my favorite book we read was from this period: “The Scarlet Letter” by Nathaniel Hawthorne. I’ll admit, sometimes slugging through page-long descriptions of flowers or how the pained looks on Dimmesdale’s face hid something deeper was difficult for me, but most of the time, I drank up the rich symbolism and unrestrained passion like a parched camel. When I was little, I always found sticks or branches shaped like staffs and imagined extensive worlds of good and evil and magic power, probably based mostly off books and movies like “The Lord of the Rings,” “Harry Potter,” “Star Wars” and any game at all with “Zelda” in the title.
Not only am I a dreamer and an idealist, but I’m also an academic, an intellectual. I pursue knowledge and truth joyfully and passionately. So you can probably imagine the great expectations I had for my college experience. People in my Lutheran grade school and high school said I was smart (which I was reluctant to believe at the time, because nobody likes an overachiever anymore), so it seemed like college, where one goes to get more knowledge, would be just the place for me. Finally I would be unbound from waiting on people who didn’t care and only attended school because they “had to.” I was expecting intense debates and deep discussions around every corner, pushing the limits of my intelligence like nothing ever had before!
Yes, I’m serious. And I wasn’t disappointed. Well, I was at first.
Adjusting to dorm life and being away from my family was much harder than I expected, for one thing. When you grow up with seven people around you who share everything, including blood, it’s not the material things you take for granted, but the relationships you have with them. My siblings and parents are my best friends, and I didn’t know that until they weren’t there. Concordia and the people here challenged my emotional and relational capacities.
Besides that, I often found classes tedious or boring, and there were still lots of people who didn’t care and didn’t present any evidence that they had brains (OK, I guess body movement, even if it’s jerky, waking-up reflex movement, counts.). To my dismay, I found that, more often than I expected, I was one of those exhausted people. There were some days when things were good, but few of the good things I experienced were directly attributable to Concordia or the professors or administration—basically, what I thought I was paying for.
I found good in unexpected places: playing Ultimate Frisbee, swing dancing, small group Bible study. But I didn’t come to Concordia and I wasn’t paying thirty-some thousand dollars to have fun and informally study God’s Word. I came to be engaged and transformed by the wisdom of the professors and my fellow students and to do the same to them. To be fair, that did happen in class, but not nearly as much or as often as I wanted.
Time passed, and I rode the roller coaster of emotion over and over. Some days I felt on top of the world. Other days, I wanted to leave the world, or at least Concordia. Through a series of unexpected events, I learned that maybe my expectations were wrong. Through another series of events, not so unexpected (by this time, I had also learned to expect the unexpected), I learned that it wasn’t my expectation of finding and pursing truth that was wrong. My expectations for how I would find truth were wrong. The most important thing my first year at Concordia taught me is that people matter. They are important. Using them for my own pursuits of glorious truth and profound knowledge, even if paying them to do so, is wrong.
So why should you care? Much disappointment and frustration in our lives comes from expecting wrongly. You assume Concordia will make you smarter because you pay it to do so; you expect to be faster and stronger because you work out; you think you will get a good job because you have a degree. None of these expectations are necessarily wrong. What might be wrong in them is the reason, the cause, the way you get to the end result.
Coming to Concordia, I expected and hoped for and wanted to find truth. I wasn’t wrong to expect that. I was wrong to expect it to come only from classes, textbooks, readings, discussions, speeches, conventions and the like. Being wrong is painful, though, and pain motivated me to change my expectation. I now realize that, while truth can be found in all those things, it is found primarily in people. When I treat my friends, professors and anyone else as more than just means to an end, I actually approach the end more quickly. Since learning that my expectations for how my pursuit of truth would occur were incomplete, I have since adjusted. Now I value and respect and love and care for people much more than I did before, and it seems like I’m approaching truth faster than ever.
I had great expectations coming to Concordia University Chicago. They weren’t wrong. They are just being met differently than I expected, and that’s okay.
