“What is one problem you face at work?” The young engineer sighed as he replaced the conversation-prompt card in the deck. “I don’t …” His eyes dropped to his hands. “I’m still trying to figure out how I can do something I love and make money. It just doesn’t seem possible.”
A rumble of agreement flowed through the other young professionals—a plastics engineer, a salesman aspiring to real estate, a nurse rethinking graduate school, an unsatisfied accountant, a nonprofit coordinator, and me, a prospective teacher. The networking event that had seated us together was invite-only, aiming to connect the young, white-collar workforce of Grand Rapids, Mich. Outside of our ages and ZIP codes, we had very little in common.
But this moment—a plea for passion and meaning—resonated with all of us.
The first time I was called a Gen Zer, I had to fight the urge to hide. A middle school teacher—righteously fed up by students’ antics—went on a tangential spiel, declaring us all unprecedentedly self-centered, raised by iPhones, Generation Me. I was surprised, but above all I was terrified that my teacher was right.
However, as my colleagues leaned in, eyes open wide, I realized that the truth was not nearly as simple as my teacher had made it seem.
“You can still change,” the salesman encouraged. “My boss, he’s 50 and is going back to school to run his own business. You’re still young. You’re not stuck.”
My Instagram reels—mostly how-tos for transitioning out of teaching or for traveling to gorgeous destinations on a budget—would agree. There are so many options to explore, why stick with an underpaying, unglamorous job?
But part of me wonders if more options are not the solution but the problem.
Our ability to imagine a more glorious future is one of the pillars of our Christian faith. We’ve been saved from sin to a glory of whose depths we can only begin to dream. But this very imagining can also be our downfall.
In a society that lauds fast fashion, the grind, and having a fridge in both your kitchen and your garage, consumption drives our imagination. We salivate over the next hit, the next purchase, the next wild night out. The quality of our existence intertwines with what we have, where we’ve been, and the speed of our trajectory to the top.
But if we’re always seeking, always exploring what we could be and what we could do, we’ll miss out on who we are and where we are. We’ll hurdle the challenges we were made to savor and squash the discomfort we need to nest in. Paul reminds us that this life is a race with a prize waiting at the end. As a reluctant runner, I know that glory is rarely felt in the second mile. Our victories in life are not our crown, but the compassion and purpose we move with and toward will be the shining gems on our diadem.
The salesman listed his favorite critically acclaimed self-help books, but the crease between the engineer’s brows only deepened. “All that to say,” the salesman reassured, “you’ve got options. If you’re unhappy, you can just change.”
Raucous laughter resonated from a nearby group as the engineer handed off the deck of prompts with a shrug. “I just wish I had a purpose.”
A nurse’s hand froze over the next prompt card. For half a second, the nurse’s face softened. “Real.”
Then he cleared his throat and read the next prompt.
About the Author
Kendy DeHaan grew up in Bradenton, Fla., and is a member of Bradenton Christian Reformed Church. She is currently studying secondary education, English, and French at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Mich.
