The following article is a part of the “Letters to…” series written by the 2023-2024 SOLA Writing Cohort, composed of college students and recent grads receiving mentorship to grow in their ability to express their faith through writing. The cohort members were given various prompts with the challenge to write an open letter to a specific recipient but one that would encourage and challenge a broader Christian audience. The prompt of this article is “Writing a Letter to Parents of College Students.”
Dear parents of college students, (or, more affectionately: Dear mom and dad,)
First off, sorry for not calling enough. You deserve more than once-a-month calls asking for money or help changing the tires.
We—college students—actually have a lot more to tell you than our call history might indicate. Because you are our place of comfort, we give you the leftovers of our energy, intentionality, and care. We always only talk about ourselves and never really ask what you are experiencing and walking through in your own life.
In our pride, we don’t heed your advice or warnings and live life the way we see fit. We often respond to your rebuke and discipline with frustration and rage, when you really deserve our gratitude and adoration.
For all of these things, we are so sorry. We are also sorry that when we come back home, our dirty laundry ends up on the floor rather than in the washer and that we deliver on our promise to do the dishes with a 48-hour delay, among various other things.
However, the reason for my writing goes deeper than just a few apologies. We want to better connect with you. Most of us feel that our relationship with you is the most important one in our lives, even more than our relationships with girlfriends, boyfriends, friends, siblings, and yes, even our dogs. Yet, the depth and breadth, or the lack thereof, of our conversations oftentimes don’t reflect this desire that we feel for you.
But it’s time to change that, right? Because, as we have experienced Jesus, he has come into our hearts and done away with the walls that kept us from being real, authentic, and vulnerable. I hope that as you read what we have to say, you’ll be both shocked and assured, challenged and affirmed, heartbroken yet hopeful. I hope that our intimacy will more closely mimic that of Jesus and His Heavenly Father, where fully loved is a product of being fully known.
What We Need To Tell You About Ourselves
We struggle and fail—a lot. Yes, we will freely admit that many of us no longer have a 4.0 GPA. Preparing to be a doctor or lawyer is much, much more challenging than our middle school selves had originally thought. Some of us lack direction in our lives and struggle with choosing between passion and profitability.
Most of us, however, would agree that college is about having fun and surrounding ourselves with great people more than our academics. But we sometimes struggle socially because it can be hard to know where we really belong and fit in. It feels like everyone has already found their place, and we are the only ones lagging behind. Although we are not always alone, loneliness seems to always be near us.
Maybe what we’ve told you up to this point is familiar territory, more or less the classic college struggles. But what you may not know is that all of this greatly threatens the one thing that we feel is holding us together: our self-worth. As we start to lose direction, feel loneliness, experience academic failures, and lag behind our peers, we slowly begin to believe more and more that maybe we are not worthy to be really fully known and fully loved.
Some of us respond to this with pride. We pretend that everything is fine and try to reclaim that worth for ourselves. We kill our bodies to achieve a physique that we think other people would appreciate. We lose sleep to attain test scores and internships that we think other people would be impressed by. We black out and get high nights on end to surround ourselves with excitement and to attempt to put an end to the loneliness of the night.
Others of us respond in despair. We lock ourselves in the quietest room in the library to study and distract our pain away. We coop up in our rooms and accept loneliness as our inevitable destiny. We go searching and seeking at the bottoms of pill containers and bottles to ease the pain of failure, loneliness, and disappointment. For some of us, we even seek ways to make sure that tomorrow never actually comes, because it’s another opportunity for the struggle of life to choke us down again.
Because of these struggles, we often live in a cycle of shame. We turn back to the things that we know hold empty promises solely for the momentary escape they provide. We feel that we are not able to open up about the “deeper” hurt and struggle, because of the questions that linger in our minds: “What if it wrecks my image?”, “What if no one can relate with me?”, “What if I really am the only one?”
We know that Jesus promises to meet us before we succumb to the pains and struggles of the day, but sometimes we echo Psalm 88 and feel that “darkness is [our] closest friend.”
These are the reasons why it’s the hardest to dial your number on our phones. In our pride, we want to believe we can take care of life apart from your guidance and care. In our despair, we don’t want to bring you into our darkness, because, “What if you don’t understand?”
What We Need To Ask You To Do
So what do you think? Are you a little bit shocked and startled? To be clear, college has been good to us as well. In the wandering and searching for a place to belong, we have slowly been surrounded by people that uplift us. In the struggle to find purpose and meaning for our careers, it’s actually taught us to be cool, collected, and even comfortable in the unknown. Most importantly, we have discovered, through all the ups and downs, just this one thing: What a friend we have in Jesus.
As we walk this journey in college, a place where the highs are so high but the lows very low, where a million things want to steal your attention but nothing seems to fully satisfy, where the road ahead seems vast but the time to choose the right path ticks fast, we ask you to help us in just one thing: Would you help our love to not grow cold?
This might sound like a strange request, but Jesus in Matthew 24 says that the “love of many will grow cold” in the end times. With the wars and earthquakes abroad and the hatred and violence at home so evident, we may not be so far removed from when Jesus returns (apparently with a sword coming out of His mouth this time).
Without your help, we are so vulnerable to growing cold in our love for Jesus. We can get lost in the pursuit of so many different things or the pain and hurt of yesterday that we lose sight of the one thing that matters: Jesus on the throne of our hearts.
Why are we confident that you can help us with this? Because you can move our hearts. From a very young age, at your every word, our hearts move to try to desire what you desire, and uphold what you uphold, whether it’s career success, well-being and comfort, or even religious correctness and right living.
While all of these values are honorable and important, they cause us to run in the aforementioned cycles of effort, disappointment, emotional lock-down, and distraction. We find ourselves far from being authentic with God and instead closer to pride or despair. We grow increasingly jaded and disillusioned by the failures: the failure to be something, the failure to make you proud, and the failure to live a life that richly satisfies our every fiber of being.
But what if your every desire for our lives was not solely focused on increasing our future 401(k) balance, having the most prestigious diploma hanging in our offices, or even possessing a morally upright reputation as a “Christian”? Rather, what if your greatest desire was for us to have rich intimacy and an authentic relationship with Jesus? You would free us not to just see the things that we should be chasing, but to turn around and see the One chasing after us. Only then, will our hearts be able to truly say that we have found rest.
What does this practically look like? A two-way vulnerable street. Just as much as we want to tell you about what we are struggling through, we want to hear about your struggles and brokenness. We will always be your baby, but as emerging adults, we want our relationship with you to evolve too. It doesn’t have to be just a relationship where you are pulling us to reach a destination, but one where we can both sit in the safety and protection of the good news and confide in all that we fail to be.
Through this, it’ll allow us not to cover ourselves with self-platitudes but sit in the unconditional love of Jesus. Through all that you are not, help us really see who Jesus is and how he works in you. We wouldn’t know what it’s like to be a parent, but from our perspective, we don’t want perfection or just the good parts of you. We want the whole and real you. You will always be our superhero, even more so when we really know all of you.
I’m not sure if you ever watch Marvel movies, but it’s not the hero’s superpower that draws us in, but rather their stories and humanity that moves us. Your story and humanity will help our love not grow cold.
Thank You
Just as an apology was the correct way to start this letter, gratitude is the only way to close. Thank you.
We can only write something like this because we know that you care. Jesus says there is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for another. That’s exactly what you do. From our time in the womb to our first steps in independence and adulthood, that has never changed. You selflessly pour out, give, and suffer for our sake. Thank you.
Maybe in a few years, we will also know what it is like to be a parent. Then our hearts will probably be filled with infinitely more gratitude than what we even feel now. Thank you for your words, your jokes, your shoulder, and your direct deposits.
Most of all, thank you for helping our love to not grow cold, when all this world seems to want to do is ice us and make us cool. We will never feel a closer resemblance of His love than yours, and you will always be a treasure to us. Thank you, we love and adore you more than words will and can ever say.
Your sons and daughters