Not too long ago I stopped by my alma mater to pray. It’d been on my to-do list for a while but for one reason or another I kept putting it off. That was, until I found myself with a half a day on my hands and my soul in desperate need of a retreat. Parking across the street, I made the familiar trek.
I’m not entirely sure what I expected to experience going back. Maybe something akin to the time my wife and I were shopping for wedding venues and we went back to the site of our first date. In a moment, we were nineteen again. I had borrowed my roommate’s car and printed mapquest directions to a spot my other roommate recommended. But that didn’t happen at all this time. In fact, it was the opposite. I walked through the building I had most of my classes in, retreaded the hallway I turned in my last project right before graduating. I looked at the directory to see which of my teachers were still around, went back to the park I spent hours praying and reading the Bible. I found the room I led my first Bible study for Black students, right across from the registrar’s office where I learned which classes transferred from my community college. The memories were there but no matter how hard I tried to put myself back in my old shoes, nothing quite fit.
I even visited the chapel they built the year before I graduated and caught the university president as he was leaving the building. Of all my years as a student there, I’d never once seen him out and about. I knew he had an office somewhere on campus and even heard stories about him being around — apparently, his daughter was a student around the same time I was — but the only time I saw him was when I shook his hand to receive the cover that would eventually house my degree. For a moment we exchanged glances, and I could tell he wanted to ask me if I needed something. As much as I partially wanted him to, I also recognized the absurdity of it all. What would I have even said? I was an alum who graduated over a decade ago. Even on that day I was one of 1,200 students with whom he shook hands. He wouldn’t have been able to tell me from Adam. I was practically nobody.
Perhaps, it’s worth mentioning that college is where everything changed for me. It’s where I came to faith, met my wife, and experienced my first forays into ministry. I can’t think of a more formative time. But walking the campus that day, it felt like we were strangers. With the wedding venue, it was just as we left it. It was us who changed. With my alma mater, we were both different and it was doing fine without me. It was a humbling realization.
It occurred to me we don’t think of our institutions outliving us. Sure, they may have existed before us, but what were they doing really? After all, we weren’t there yet. They may even exist after us, but only as a shell of its former self. After all, we’re not there anymore. But walking around the campus that day, it dawned on me that this had and has been the thought of every student of every class for all time. We all want to believe we’re special and irreplaceable, but if we’re all special, no one is special. As unique and special as we think we are, we are replaceable. Sometimes, it happens before our very eyes. A group of our friends graduate only to have a new batch of students come in that look and act exactly like them.
When I graduated high school, I distinctly remember feeling like the last of an era. We were the last group of students to remember both the old principal and counselor. We were the last batch of students to have a handful of teachers before they were forced into retirement. Our departure felt like the death of something. The reality is our institutions leave more of a mark on us than we do on them.
This, of course, can lead us down two ways of thinking: nihilism, which says our lives don’t matter so what’s the point; or the more existentialist route, which says we make our own meaning. We can make ourselves worth remembering through pursue fame and achievement. Certainly, I’ve felt each of these at different stages of my life. But walking that campus I was reminded of a conversation I had with my InterVarsity staff worker that presented me another option as a college student. That of legacy.
Maybe no one was going to remember us in a hundred years, but what if we could leave behind something that would outlive us? Maybe no one would remember us by name, but maybe they experience what we’ve left behind. I suppose institutions are a legacy in and of themselves but this was the parable of the Sower. Yes, there are and would be a number of seeds that bear and would bear little to no fruit, but there are and would be seeds that land in good soil and produces thirty, sixty, a hundredfold. That fruit would go on to produce more seeds and those seeds would bear more fruit. Now that fruit wouldn’t know the original seed it owes its existence to, yet it couldn’t exist without it. So, it us with us. Each of us come from a long line of people before us. We are products of their legacy. The question becomes what our legacy will be? We come and go. The wind blows and we are gone, our place remembers us no more. Time marches on without us and history gets made after us. But maybe it’s less about what we individually are and more about how we can contribute to the greater tapestry of the story of God. All these years later I’m still not entirely sure what my legacy will be, but I know it’s something I aspire leave.
Tomy Wilkerson 