On Reading, Reflecting, and Saying “Thank You”

BY: MADISON PLETAN

As an overeager, perfectionist college student, I was perpetually drowning in assigned reading: thirty pages of Plato, a hundred pages of Dante (make that two hundred, still behind from last class), two chapters of the biology text (can I skip that?), etc., etc. At a certain point—around 1 AM—my eyes started to blur. The last thing I wanted to do was keep up with the philosophy assignments, let alone read for fun.

Here is the first thing I would tell my college self: get eight hours of sleep. (Seriously.) Then, when your brain feels more like a brain and less like oatmeal, read something you want to read. It doesn’t have to be Crime and Punishment—a fascinating essay you discovered on Twitter will do. Or if your English major roommate can’t stop gushing about a poem, read it so you can talk about it with her. I don’t say this to guilt you into adding yet another item to your miles-long to-do list; I say it because the best reading is unhurried, delightful, and restful, and it’s too easy to lose that when you’re used to racing through assigned chapters at the speed of light.

“How long had I pretended that my constant striving would guarantee success—and how long had I been plagued with the anxiety of trying to earn approval and security?”

There were a handful of works that I stumbled across in college that smacked me in the gut—in the best way. They weren’t necessarily the most “important” things I was reading, but they spoke to the particular tasks, anxieties, and struggles I was wrestling with at the time.  

I vividly remember scrolling Facebook one night in Olds and finding an essay on human flourishing, written by a woman who had been deeply involved in campus ministry for years. Drawing on both Scripture and her personal experiences counseling undergraduates, she argued that Christian students ought to be characterized by a profound peace. All too often, they succumb to the intense pressure to succeed, laboring “as if their efforts alone determine all their success today and security tomorrow.” In that sentence, I saw myself as if in a mirror. How long had I pretended that my constant striving would guarantee success—and how long had I been plagued with the anxiety of trying to earn approval and security? I didn’t really know how to rest and have the peace of Christ the author described, but I wanted it badly. I bookmarked the essay and returned to it at least a dozen times freshman year, whenever I felt myself edging towards overload and stress.

Here is the second thing I would tell my college self: you are being shaped in a permanent, eternal way by the things you read. When you’re blasting through a reading and a sentence smacks you in the gut, pause. Reflect on it. Flag down a friend and try to tell them why you love it. Write it down somewhere, if you can. At the end of the year, when you’re packing up and purging your desk, you’ll find tattered sticky notes with powerful and true things written on them, and they’ll seem even more meaningful than they did when you wrote them down. 

Last month, I revisited the essay on human flourishing, seven years after encountering it for the first time. Reading it felt like opening a time capsule from freshman year; I remembered so clearly how burned out I felt and how much I wanted the restful, flourishing life the essay described. There were still a couple of sentences I could recite word-for-word. On a whim, I found the email address of the author and dashed off an email. I told her I had read the essay during my freshman year, that God had brought it to me at just the right time, that it had profoundly encouraged me.

“You are being shaped in a permanent, eternal way by the things you read.”

To my surprise, the author responded a week later. It’s amazing to think, she wrote, how God uses others to shape and guide us, even across the ages and whether or not we’ve met in the flesh. “We are about to drop off our oldest child for her first year of college tomorrow,” she said. “I am truly thinking of your email as I think about the changes she is about to go through.  I am praying for God to provide for her, as he graciously provided for you, at just the right moments.”

Here is the last thing I would tell my college self: you are surrounded by saints. Saints do your makeup in the hall bathroom for President’s Ball, saints offer you tissues during tearful Organic Chemistry office hours, and saints write profound essays about human flourishing that God gives you at precisely the right time. There are some people you’ll never get to thank for their work on this side of heaven—you can’t shoot Anselm a quick email in praise of Proslogion. But there are other brothers and sisters in Christ who you see every day you do have the opportunity to thank. So tell them you’re grateful for them. Share with them how they’ve impacted you. Praise Jesus for them! The exercise of gratitude will bless you just as much as it encourages them.