Losing Out: Finding a Future in 2021
Uni is shut again. In March my peers and I were sent home. As five months passed, each leaf of my calendar was littered with events that never came to be: exams (cancelled), May Ball (cancelled), holiday to Wales (cancelled), a wedding (I watched it on YouTube instead). Missed opportunities, missed chances, missed time.
‘I just feel a bit cheated’, my friend told me over the phone. We were talking in the wake of the news that we weren’t allowed back to our student houses until March (‘at least’, the official email put it ominously). I sympathized with her.
It’s been 11 months now since I sat in a lecture theatre, 47 weeks since my last unwise all-nighter in the library, 337 days since I hugged my friends goodbye for spring break. Since September it’s been online uni in a cold university flat. We’ve been denied the chance to build friendships to define the edges of our newly-adult lives. Student mental health is at an all-time low. It is easy to feel cheated: it feels like we’re missing out, losing opportunities, losing precious time.
“But I can hardly complain, can I?” my friend continued, “I mean, students aren’t exactly the primary victims of this pandemic, are we?” She isn’t wrong. As I was writing this post, I kept laying down my pen, thinking – ‘I’m just complaining – these are just little things’. Strangely, though, that thought didn’t cheer me up. Acknowledging that my loss is perhaps less than someone else’s doesn’t take away the nagging sense that I am grieving for something.
But my God gives me space to feel my loss. The Bible tells us that anything less than the way things were supposed to be is a reason to grieve, and introduces us to Jesus, who does grieve with and for us. Nowhere in the Bible are we told, ‘it could be worse’, or ‘you’ve got it better than other people,’ – in fact, the Bible is full of people expressing their anger, grief and despair in the midst of loss. They don’t keep it to themselves, they write, sing, cry to God. In the Bible, grief isn’t left as a human issue, it isn’t something we have to deal with alone. Jesus, God, came to Earth and said‘come to me, all who are weary, and I will give you rest’. He walked our earth and breathed our air, an air filled with pain of different sorts – He came to be close to the brokenhearted, and He still is. God knows how you are feeling, and He will listen to your pain.
But He doesn’t leave you in it.
Perhaps one of the most poignant aspects of student life at the moment is a longing for stability, for normality, for a return to what we know – or what we expected – and some sense of certainty in our future. I’ve spent my Christmas break researching internships and have been told over and over again, ‘due to the uncertainty…’, ‘we cannot guarantee, this year…’, ‘our internships will not be going ahead…’ – phrases that do not fill me, or my CV, with hope. Itis easy to feel cheated: but by whom or by what it’s hard to define.
Simply, our world is unreliable, as 2020 showed so drastically and unkindly.
But, there is a stable future, the Bible promises us, that we can have hope in. God doesn’t leave us in our grief, or our fear for the future. Instead, He provides us with a certainty to cling onto, a rock out of the waters of grief, a promise that will not change with the news bulletins, a future that will not be snatched away or let down: Himself. Unchangingand unchangeable. He doesn’t promise anything less than He can deliver; He promises more than we would think to ask for, eternal life; He is what we do ask for: certainty, a future, an end to grief.
Not in a university term, or a job interview gone-right, or a rebuilt economy, but in a Man, who fulfilled all the promises He kept, who acknowledged the grief of living, who was God and who died to offer us a future that cannot be taken away from us.