TKC Letters Project - To Try, To Fail, To Grow

There aren't many institutions

in our culture today that task 18-20 year old kids with the responsibilities of maintaining a city apartment, getting their own groceries, making their own meals, leading their peers, dressing professionally for class, owning their own beliefs and faith, and making meaningful contributions to real-world industries, all while maintaining a rigorous academic curriculum.

When I arrived at King's, I readily acknowledge that I was both unprepared and overconfident for these responsibilities: a dangerous combination.

My first couple of years were marked by awkward honor confrontations, unhealthy personal habits, and deeply prideful behavior.

Through many humbling conversations, trying events, and many, many knocks on an office door of a staff or faculty member I respected, I learned to process and to manage the responsibilities of life in a supportive environment.

I will freely admit that this school asks a lot of its students. I've heard it said that it sometimes asks too much. In all but a handful of extreme cases that I know of, I respectfully disagree.

Such a college experience is not (and was not!) easy. But I have never heard it said that an easy endeavor was a meaningful one.

As C.S. Lewis says in Mere Christianity: "If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth—only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair."

The King's College enables you to seek truth, and at the same time affords you the opportunity to try to live it out. When you succeed, you are surrounded by mentors and friends who will celebrate and share your joy. And when you fall, that same community will lovingly correct you, and guide you to learn from it. The result is a uniquely
formative, and deeply fulfilling educational experience.

Real responsibility serves the twofold purpose of revealing our weaknesses and refining our strengths. It displays both our shortcomings (the reason we need a savior) and our gifts (the ways in which we are designed to give glory to Him).

Our failure is not final, our pain is not without purpose, and our God is greater than our light and momentary struggles.

This process and perspective are of the utmost importance. Our culture is replete with spineless, lackluster institutions that exist more to insulate and assure their students than to challenge, mold, and mature them.

This college and the people who continue to make it a reality deserve our support so that its radically countercultural and Christ-centered mission can continue to inspire and equip those who will be the hands and feet of the Church in the decades to come.