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“I feel like I’m being thrown into it, but with care,” said David Bowman, senior marketing major. “It’s like being gently thrown.”
I laughed as I sat across from Bowman at the corner table in Barefoots. He had agreed to meet with me to talk about his uncertain future after college, and how he was dealing with it. For many seniors, this time can be stressful, thinking about leaving the place they’ve called home for four years and setting out into the real world, as well-meaning and more experienced adults describe life after college. I asked him how he thought about the past, present and future, and which one he found himself thinking about most often.
“I think the present is the hardest [to think about],” he said as he leaned back against the wall. “I’m a very nostalgic person. I like looking at the past and thinking about it, but a lot of times, it’s just hard to live in the now. And then the future I don’t really care enough, which is kind of bad, but I just don’t really care. So I tend to procrastinate.”
Bowman always appears to be relaxed around campus. You can see him in Barefoots joking around with some of his residents or in Cobo dancing. He doesn’t seem to be worried about what the future holds, and I think that has to do with the way he thinks about it.
“You have to lean on the unknown more, which is kind of comforting,” Bowman told me. “You don’t have to stress about one specific thing, like there’s so many different things going forward to look forward to.”
Bowman’s plans right now are pretty flexible. He’s thought about going to seminary right after college or even renting an apartment with a couple of guys and working as a barista for a while. Bowman grinned as he told me that a lot of people are surprised when he says that he’s a marketing major. Most people think that he’s in social work or even graphic design. Even though Bowman doesn’t have a set plan for his life, he doesn’t seem bothered by it.
“You don’t know what’s going to present itself. . .with uncertainty, there’s that drive of adventure and something exciting.”
Bowman doesn’t seem to want to know what the future holds. He’s content to do what he loves even if that doesn’t result in a big paycheck.
“The unknown is always going to be there,” he said shrugging his shoulders. “So you have to kind of be aware of it otherwise you’re not even respecting it.”
“Respect the unknown,” I said dramatically and laughing a little bit.
“Yeah, seriously!” he exclaimed, leaning forward in his seat. He went on to say that Christians’ typical response to how to face the future is to say that they’re leaning on Christ.
“Of course, they’re leaning on Christ,” he said, “but there’s more to it than that.”
Even for people who know what they’re going to do and what God has planned for them have to lean on Christ when they go through hard times.
Bowman admitted, “I have to trust Christ that it’s okay to not know everything as long as I’m still being active and still doing work.”
And that’s what Bowman is doing with his last couple semesters of college. He’s been learning about business, but he doesn’t know what he’ll use that knowledge for yet. He’s been a resident advisor for the past two years and loves investing in the guys in his building, but he doesn’t know how God will use that in the coming years.
Bowman’s final advice for incoming college freshmen is to pursue what they’re passionate about, regardless of how much money you’ll make from it.
“If you want to do music, be a music major,” he said matter-of-factly. “What’s holding you back? If you have a passion, you need to go after it.”
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“O temps suspend ton vol!”
Translation: “Pause in your trek, O Time”
In typical Avery Rist fashion, who is a senior French and English double major, our conversation concluded with a reference to French poetry. It was a fitting quote that was representative of our discussion about Rist’s future. Rist admitted that sometimes she wants to pause time just so that she has a break to figure things out before everything comes at once. She has conflicting feelings about the future. In a way, the future is liberating because she’ll be able to get out of Jackson and go to another city for graduate school, but she also has fears about the job market since there’s a stereotype about humanities majors not finding the best jobs. Rist hasn’t let this fear overwhelm her though.
“Even if you don’t think you’ve made the right decision for a major or whatever,” she said, “you have to trust that you will learn something from that and that God has you there for a reason. And I know that that sounds a little cliche. But I think there is truth there, and I think that is a way to help navigate thinking about the future.”
Rist is very realistic about the uncertain future, which she laughingly refers to as “the nebulous, vast, and dimly lit future.” She treats uncertainty as a fact of life and something you have to face rather than ignore. No matter how much we plan, those plans are always subject to change. That’s why we have to trust God.
Rist quoted Luke 12:25 to me, which says, “And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life?”
“We think of the future as years and days,” Rist explained. “And we’re not adding anything by worrying, and that’s convicting for me.”
Because we don’t know what will happen in the future, we have to depend on God, and that dependence helps us grow closer to God. It’s not bad to plan because that’s part of being prudent, and a lot of Proverbs is about prudence, but we can’t let our planning be where we find our security.
Rist paused before saying, “Faith is trust in the narrative of God and that He has set up the world and orchestrated how your life is to be.”
A lot of times, we can feel like God is ignoring us and our prayers about our future. I noticed during our interview that Rist had words written all over her hands. I asked her what they said, and they were quotes she had memorized and written on her hands when she was tired and needed to feel something. Just the other day, she had written on her hand a quotation from the poem “Denial” by George Herbert.
It reads, “O that thou shouldst give dust a tongue / To cry to thee / And then not hear it crying!”
Rist tilted her head and said, “I guess that connects to this. Sometimes we feel that way when we worry about the future. Why would you give dust a tongue if you’re not going to answer it?”
At the end of our conversation, I asked Rist if there was any advice she would give to juniors. She sat there for a while, thinking about what to say. Suddenly, she pointed her finger and exclaimed, “Networking! That’s what it was.”
A practical way to avoid fear of the future is to actively prepare for it. A simple way to do that is to make connections now while you have the opportunity so that at some point maybe those connections can help you find a job. God works through us and other people, so even though your plans might not be certain, you don’t have to be idle either.
Photos courtesy of Neil Cole