It’s that time of year—in the calendar and in the rhythm of college life—when we instinctively look ahead. Perhaps we declare a resolution to those around us, or search out an app to download that will help us track and manage our habits. (Our consumption culture has just finished a season of encouraging us to indulge, after all, and now we’re exhorted to take control so that adds some pressure, too.)
On college campuses, soon-to-be graduating seniors are often peering more earnestly into the future, as well—perhaps finalizing applications or awaiting graduate school decisions; seeking to network and interview for positions that are still coming into focus; wondering with a mix of excitement and uncertainty about a position that they may have already secured; navigating relational commitments and how best to live into them in this next period; recalibrating as plans shift.
In all this, possibilities beckon, sometimes pulling in quite different directions.
I often think of these as “threshold moments” (a term I’m not alone in embracing but one whose genesis is unclear to me). This metaphor implies a rich backstory with any number of experiences that have formed and shaped us, and we’re about to walk into a new space, still connected to what came before but also distinctly its own. In my personal experience, thresholds stir up all sorts of emotions because I’m more keenly aware of being poised between past and future, moving forward and looking back. If I’m being honest, my life is a series of these thresholds, and not just at the big milestone markers like graduation. Thresholds always seem to loom larger, though, when accompanied with extra signposting and expectation.
Lately, I’ve been privileged to share thoughtful, searching conversations with several seniors approaching graduation as they weigh options and an abiding desire to live fully and meaningfully into their values while embracing a sense of purpose. Even if they are still discovering more about themselves everyday (as we all are), they can eloquently describe what they care about, what they are good at, and what is life-giving for them as individuals and as community members engaged in broader concerns…but how precisely do you fit those pieces together? What shape does it make? How do you choose this shape over that one?
I can hear my own deliberations echoed in these questions, and even though I recognize it as a fallacy, I feel the pull of single, simple answers. We seek clarity and certainty. It must be this…just one clear thing, please.
It is both fortunate and frustrating that our purpose is more complex and more multi-faceted, that it can’t be neatly winnowed down to one role, that it resists the bounds of being defined by just position or career. This is actually life-giving news (even if it doesn’t always feel that way). It translates into the abundance of “both/and” possibilities, eschewing the logic of “either/or.”
In my conversations with college students, it seems to me that they often perceive their threshold as a front door as they leave the relatively safe confines of home or college life for a wide and somewhat unfamiliar world. In these sorts of moments, we are called to the present, to paying attention and responding as we discern and take the best next step. But that step doesn’t have to be perfect or permanently defining. One of the lessons that I personally take away from Christianity and the Lutheran heritage of this particular place is that we are not fully defined by where we find ourselves. There is a God who travels beyond all thresholds—there in our spaces of home and comfort, there on the open road, always with us and holding us.
For me, the words from what our family calls the Holden Prayer ring true at the threshold. We are called to “ventures of which we cannot see the ending, by paths as yet untrodden.” We are invited to a next step on still unfolding journeys.
–by Dr. Anna Stewart, Director of the Institute for Leadership & Service