The Other Side of Childhood

In using the Wizard of Oz story as an analogy, Richard Rohr in his book Falling Upward, suggests that after the experience of his education, he “was surely not in Kansas anymore.”  He goes on to say, “I had passed, like Dorothy, ‘over the rainbow.’”

He also notes, perhaps as a bit of warning to those engaging in becoming educated, “life was much easier on the childhood side of the rainbow.”

David Brooks, a national columnist for the New York Times, in a similar vein of thought, encourages his readers in The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life, to think about the great value of a life of significance as compared to a life of mere achievement, even when the achievement is great. For Brooks, the primary distinctive between those “two mountains” upon which we may live is “selfish” versus “selfless.”

This semester we continue our “reboot journey.” Where are those moments when we may need to turn the machine off and restart? And sometimes, where are those moments when we need to do the “factory reset” kind of reboot?

College – especially in the context of a school like Point where we care about faith, we care about learning who we are and how we got here, we care about where we are headed – must be a reboot time in our lives. If you graduate from Point and “are still in Kansas,” then you missed the opportunity God placed right on your front door step. 

This really has little if anything to do with whether you are a better business person, counselor, teacher, criminal justice person, musician, ministry person, or any other skill. Life is about far more than “achievement” in the world of STEM. Life is about who you are and who, through Christ, you can become! Don’t misunderstand that to mean those other areas are unimportant, just that if that’s all that happens in college, you may end up back in Kansas! (No offense to Kansas.)

What if as we begin this new semester together at Point – either in classrooms in West Point or virtually for on-line students or in some combination of both options – we committed ourselves to focus on what we can do this semester that will help us “pass over whatever rainbow” we need to pass over in order to become the person of significance God has called us to be?

After all, Jesus said “I came that they might have life and have it abundantly.” (John 10:10) Through our faith in Him and commitment to follow Him, we can “pass over the rainbows” that hold us back and discover a life of “significance, not mere achievement.”

IF we do, we will discover “life on the other side of childhood.”