A Light in the Dark

Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.

Robert Frost

Sometime during the last decade or so, I found a yellowed sheet of lined paper crammed in the back of a ringed binder with a hand-written list of my future goals written during the year I was seventeen. That much-younger-me was not just shy, but quiet and withdrawn in almost all company except my immediate family. I was a senior in a new school–the fourth of my high school career. Before I walked through the doors of Highland High, I knew exactly four people in my class—all of whom I’d met at church in the couple of weeks before classes began. It was a rough year for me, and as it turned out, it was rough for my country was well.

 Highland High in Albuquerque, New Mexico, was built during an era when the height of the ceilings and the solidity of the walls expressed the importance of the building. Most classrooms had a tall bank of windows covering at least ½ of the outside wall, only the highest of which could be opened by standing on a ladder and yanking a lever at the top of the pane. Since the custodians were solely authorized to handle that, our classrooms with their 12 or 14-foot ceilings were too hot in the spring and fall and too cold in the winter.

It was a chilly afternoon in November 1963, when the school principal interrupted all classwork to announce that President John F. Kennedy had been shot. The administrator moved his microphone next to the radio in his office, and every person in the building stopped to listen in dead silence as Walter Cronkite’s voice described the horrifying events in Dallas. By the time the buses arrived to take us home, school had been cancelled for the rest of the week, and for four continuous days television stations broadcast nothing but live coverage of the events surrounding the President’s death and burial.

I don’t know if it was the cloud of uncertainty about the nation’s future at that sobering time, but something prompted my local church youth leader (in those days it was called the Mutual Improvement Association), a fiery redhead about my mother’s age, to hold a special meeting at her house (the church was a long way across town) for the three or four girls my age. After a brief discussion about goals and how to make them, she asked each of us to spend a half-hour or so thinking about what we’d like to accomplish in our lives and identify five or six items to work towards. A couple of the girls, including her daughter, grimaced and rolled their eyes, but It never occurred to me, the only introvert member of the group, to blow off an assignment given by an authority figure, so I dutifully made a list and shoved it into the back of my Treasures of Truth binder—(which was supposed to house our favorite scriptures, personal diary, etc.,–and which I irreverently called my Treasures of Trash) where it sat unnoticed for almost 50 years.

I re-discovered it when I was cleaning out a stack of random paperwork in the back of an old file cabinet. The ink was so faded I could barely read it. But it wasn’t its existence after all these years which surprised me—it was the fact that I had COMPLETED everyone of those goals. The most recent one—write a novel–finished only a year or two before.

I’ve had a LOT of experience with seventeen-year-olds. In fact, on the last day of school for my seniors, I always had them push the desks back against the wall and sit in a circle on the floor reminiscent of their kindergarten days. One by one, I’d asked them to spend a minute or two and share with the class what they hoped to accomplish with their lives. Most could articulate something about the days immediately ahead—college or mission or military. Having a family down the road was on most of their minds, but it was rare when a student knew they wanted to enter politics or become a rancher or a diesel mechanic or a journalist, specifically. So I knew it was out of the ordinary that I had imagined exactly where I was headed at seventeen. (Of course, there were some glitches: I had eight kids instead of the “five” on my list which my husband says is clear early evidence of my math disability.) I’ve thought a good deal about how that happened. Maybe it was because, unlike most kids that age, my life was fragmented by new places, people, and directions every couple of years, so my internal goals were the only constant in my life? Maybe I was just lucky? Or maybe I was too lazy to consider an alternate direction?

But one thing stands out to me today. Change swirls around every life, much of it far beyond our control—war, economic upheaval, natural disaster, disease, political unrest, familial chaos, untenable loss, even the assassination of a president. Because we can’t see tomorrow, we teach ourselves to lament our current condition and fear the outcome of another day. Goals, however unlikely or impractical, give us purpose and propel us forward, lighting our way with hope. Even a small glow on a dark path is enough to brave tomorrow.