The answer to the hopelessness of our times

If you are a college student or young adult in the US today, you are part of a group unlike any other in the history of the world. You have more resources, information, and opportunities at your fingertips than any other group. Ever.

The thing about your generation is that you cannot be pinned down. Many of you have grown up with every material need provided for. Others experienced great need. Yet all of you have grown up in a culture burdened by broken families, shifting social norms, and the blaring voice of the media giving empty promises of what brings happiness. As the young writer Sarah Vabulas said, “we are battling stereotypes of being called lazy, untitled, and ungrateful, but most difficult of all, we are searching for something… Young adults are grasping for truth” (Understanding the Young Adult Culture).

I agree with Sarah, but this truth is not so easy to come by. In this age of changing friends, moving family, career and college transfers, and a monsoon of constant information, who can be trusted? Who is telling the truth? We are looking for rock on which to build our foundations, but there is sand all around us.

In the midst of our blaring lives Jesus whispers to us, therefore whoever hears these sayings of mine, and does them, I will liken him to a wise man who built his house on the rock: and the rain descended, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house; and it did not fall, for it was founded on the rock. But everyone who hears these sayings of mine, and does not do them, will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand: and the rain descended, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house; and it fell. And great was its fall.  (Matthew 7:24-27).

You are looking for truth and so are your neighbors, colleagues, and friends. You are looking for a compass to point north when the world around you is pulling every which way. Your generations’ houses are falling all around and the good news is this: you have a beautiful and irreplaceable role to play!

Which begs the question, what will your role be?

Will you point to the foundation of rock, drawing others to the truth and love of Christ and the stability and strength of a relationship with Him? Or sand, a crumbling and fading force that precedes a great fall?