Scholarship Essay #1

Every generation faces new challenges and new problems. What do you think is the biggest difference between your generation and older generations? How do you think these differences will affect the future of our country and/or your career choice?

                When reading, if one comes upon a word that is unknown to the reader, a clever way to avoid looking around in one’s closet for a dictionary is to use context clues within the text to understand the word in question.  Understanding the nature of one’s generation is much the same.  Who came before?  Who is coming after?  I am a member of the in-between generation, the Millennials, Generation Y, the fulcrum upon which traditions of duty and respect turned to the pursuit of entertainment and the unassailable, all-consuming potency of subjective opinions replacing the empirical standard of truth.  In short, my generation is “me” before “we.”

                In the last few decades technological advances have exploded onto the scene, affecting an unbelievable amount of change not only in one’s daily life, but also morphing how one interacts with others and how one understands his or herself.  And one of the most potent expressions of this change is time.  Everything is quicker, faster, instantly available.  One can order almost anything online and have it delivered to the front door.  Much like throwing gasoline on a fire, this sort of instant gratification, when combined with my generation’s focus on self over and before others, has created a discouragingly pervasive attitude of entitlement.  This leads to many within my generation switching jobs much more frequently than past generations and asking “what’s in it for me?” in regards to all social relationships rather than, “how can I give of myself?”  Having lived all across the country, (Chicago, Seattle, rural Iowa, rural Minnesota, rural Virginia, Michigan, Alaska,  and more) I’ve seen this attitude of “me” before “we” in every place that I’ve lived.  And regardless of where I was at the time, that short attention span, me first and second and always mentality was something that even mature, respectable members of my generation struggled with.

                But we are not defined only by the ugliness of our attention-deficit pursuit of self (magnified in the generation that is following us), we are also the generation that wants to talk, wants to deal with issues, wants to have something real and meaningful and sincere.  With so many of us growing up in broken homes and seeing the traditions of our parents breaking down (in application, not in principle), we want something that we can trust (as evidenced in many Millennials waiting longer to get married).  Combining this desire for sincerity with our hunger for self-satisfaction, we are a generation of rising and falling convictions, of mighty struggles against ourselves, of terrifying tidal waves of unrepentant selfishness and of hurt, so much hurt.

                Our future is bleak.  Gone are the dreams of futuristic utopias.  The Jetsons have been replaced with The Walking Dead.  In books, movies, TV shows and especially video games, post-apocalyptic has replaced the once bright vision of tomorrow.  My generation was in class when the Twin Towers fell.  Sometimes I wonder if our pursuit of “me” is a broken defense mechanism driving us away from hope in response to the tragedy and emptiness around us and within us.

                My generation is divided between “me” and “we.”  I want to be in a position to tip scales, one at a time, towards sincerity and awareness of our place and away from the hollow, bottomless highway of me, me, me, me.  I can see no other place better suited to do just that, than the ministry, than as a pastor of a church, where I will proclaim to all generations that Jesus Christ died to save us from “me” and rose from the dead so that “we” could live with him, together, sincerely, with meaning, trusting in the hope of Jesus as our Lord and Savior.