What Was I Made For…

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” It is the question that can throw someone on the brink of graduation into a spiral and one that has sparked plenty of quarter-life crises. It can be overwhelming for young adults transitioning into a new phase of life, whether that is graduating high school, earning a degree, or entering the workforce. Many people just are not in tune with their mission on this earth, and therefore have no idea what their purpose should be. Even with the normalcy and surprising depth of this question, it is nonetheless an important one to ask often to our young students.

We have witnessed the importance of dreams in our older students. The students who we received as fifth graders in the midst of CoVid. They came out of isolation and into school missing some skills. Out of all the basic, foundational skills they missed out on learning during NTI, the one that has been hardest for us to help them overcome as a school team is without a doubt the ability to dream. Without a dream to motivate you, what can possibly make you motivated to learn, to acquire skills that will help you towards that dream. How can you set goals and milestones and plan a path forward if you have no dream. It is a problem that we have made a lot of progress with our older students on in the past couple of years, but it is one that we still occasionally see rear its ugly head. That is why it is so important to continue to ask that question to our younger students, and why it is so encouraging to hear when they are ready with answers.

This week at breakfast Shawn asked one of our first graders what his answer would be and he immediately replied that he wanted to be an astronaut. With that answer it can then be used to help motivate him when learning gets hard. To teach him about the importance of math and science to become an astronaut. Even if that dream changes 25 times before he graduates, it at least gives us something to use to motivate him now, until the next dream kicks in. I was talking to one of our second grader’s Sonny Ray about his dreams, and he told me he wanted to go to college and get three degrees and be a doctor, “not like a medical doctor, but just a doctor of something”, he said, “even if I have to work two jobs to make it happen”. That is something that can help intrinsically motivate a student, because if you can instill intrinsic motivation instead of getting a kid to rely on external rewards then they are going to be set up much better for an independent future. It is important to revisit this question every so often with students because over time they will learn new skills that can unlock new passions and dreams in them.

One of our first grade students, Coraline, has been with us since Pre-K. Last week she went to Young Producer’s Club and discovered she was a natural on the piano. In one sitting she learned and recorded a perfect rendition of a Billie Eilish song. With this new found skill, Coraline’s answer can now be totally different than a week ago just because of one experience. The song she learned to play is called “What was I Made For”, which I think is a beautiful representation of this topic; because what we are really asking when we ask students if they know what they want to do when they grow up is “have you spent anytime thinking about what you were made for?” Have you thought about what God has put you on this earth to do? If we can get our student’s to regularly think about this as they are growing up in a safe space surrounded by Love, then we can help make the question not so dreaded as they get older. How beautiful would it be for a bunch of students to be graduating telling people exactly what they are going to do in life with complete confidence because they have spent 12 years listening to God about what he has made them for. So never hesitate to ask a kid what they want to do when they grow up, because it is just encouraging them to listen to God about what he has equipped them to do in their communities.

Ethan

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