Hypothetically Speaking

You’ve been publishing well, the teaching is coming along surprisingly well, and you have been welcomed into a team of three senior professors with whom you will be submitting a very large research grant in three weeks. The usually-conservative lead professor is very optimistic that your team will be funded.

It is a beautiful April day, and the grant team has agreed to an early picnic lunch right next to the large river that forms the boundary of campus. You are surprised to find yourself with an unscheduled half-hour right before the picnic. Since you missed your fitness run the previous day due to a faculty meeting that ran late, you decide to take a fast walk along the river trail before lunch.

At this time of the morning, you are happy to find the river trail is pleasantly deserted. A couple of hundred yards into your tranquil walk, your peace and quiet are interrupted. A frantic scream draws your eye to the river, and there struggling desperately to stay afloat is a 20-year-old student of the opposite sex.

Let’s imagine that as a youngster you were on the swim team and had completed an advanced life-saving course. You look for a pole to extend to the drowning one, but there is nothing. Likewise, there is no rescue ring and no boat.

The struggling student is spending more time underwater than on top, and your only alternative is the last resort of getting into the water and attempting to rescue by grabbing and pulling the student to safety.

But… the optics cause you to hesitate. Could not a cross-chest carry of a student of the opposite sex while you are both soaking wet be construed as inappropriate sexual behavior? The student newspaper could have a front page zinger, especially if someone’s phone camera captures the “hug.”  

The quantitative side of you quickly ascertains that the drowning one only has another 50 or 60 years of life anyway! Is it worth risking your flourishing career? Would you risk being dropped from your research team?

I am hoping that we all conclude hypothetically, despite the potentially harmful optics, that we wouldn’t hesitate to jump into the water and rescue the drowning student.

But, let’s leave the hypothetical and return to our real lives on campus. All around us we have students who are “drowning” spiritually. So many of our students are struggling with a life without hope, meaning, or purpose. As long as all goes well, they are fine. But when grades or family or circumstances go bad, they have no safety net.

Those of us who know Christ, know that true hope, purpose, and meaning can only come from a relationship with Christ. But mentioning Christ on a university campus is often considered to have worse optics than a cross-chest carry of a drowning student of the opposite sex.

The quantitative side of you says that our students will live for eternity.

Is telling students about Christ worth the risk?