When God's Vision Became My Vision
“This is a city filled with college graduates who never returned home.”
Boston’s Prudential Center
Boston is a concentrated area of elite schools. Filled with bustling streets of bikers, runners, college students, and young professionals, the city has a character that exudes education and purpose. Often compared to a modern-day Athens, the currency of this city is knowledge and with the high population of college students, it’s also a place filled with wandering souls that moved here alone and away from their families. As Boston Globe columnist Joan Vennochi puts it, “this is a city filled with college graduates who never returned home,” a characterization that easily could’ve been my reality just a few short months ago.
Growing Up
I grew up surrounded by books and knowledge.
Boston Public Library
My dad has a PhD and did research for many years at different universities, including Brown where he cloned the first monkey. My mom has a Master’s in Library Science and worked as a reference librarian (her job was basically to research any question under and around the sun for people). She would often take me to work with her where I would spend countless hours reading and piling up on books and in the summers, writing book reports.
As a senior in high school, I wanted to major in English at a small liberal arts school where I could participate in tiny eight-person classes and grow close relationships with professors. I wanted to go to a school so small that the community would be the school. I was eager to prove myself intellectually and to be recognized for my quiet brilliance (which I did not have but wanted people to think I had).
When I entered college (unfortunately at a large, public research university), I majored in English with a specialization in Literature and the Culture of Information and got a Professional Editing minor. On the side, I worked as a writing tutor for college and grad students, edited and proofread my friends’ papers and grad school applications, edited creative short stories, and worked with grad students and researchers editing their papers. My career plans after graduation? Some amorphous goal that involved moving to a big city like Boston or New York and somehow working my way to being an editor at a nameless publishing house… somewhere.
Moving Out
A week after graduation, I packed my life into two suitcases and a box, moved to Boston with 90 other people, and settled into a fast-paced, almost dizzying rhythm of a life lived for Jesus. Yep, you heard me right. In the thick of trying to pursue my own things in college, I had the privilege of experiencing the picture of the early church depicted in Acts 2 and my life’s vision shifted. As I lived the typical student life -- eating fast food for multiple meals a week, making memories with friends during delirious hours of the night, planning out all nighters to catch up on work -- I also met a group of other Christians who lived out their beliefs in their day-to-day lives. In the chaos of college life, I experienced sharing and living life together, seeing the gospel come to life as I witnessed people not just doing church but actually being the church through concrete acts to love others and God, and the feeling of being fully known yet loved despite all the unlovable parts. And by the end of the four years, I saw that what the gospel says about life and eternity is true for each of us: that regardless of how it might appear, we each have our own broken lives and stories and the only solution, not balm or band aid but solution, is through the restorative and redemptive path of the cross. And if we have such a solution, how can I not share it with others?
Growing close in college
Cooking meals together
Alyssa and friends at the drive-in theater
A Changed Boston
Where Boston used to be a city of possibility -- a place where I could be that young professional editor/publisher/author living in my own one-bedroom apartment, not having to worry about other people and their problems -- somewhere along the way God said that this city would be a spiritual battlefield. Instead of fighting and competing with other people to make my way up professionally, I would be living life together with 90 other people and working together to best serve and meet the needs of the city.
So we found ourselves here, in a city with lonely college students trying to find their way in the world. But with us is the amazing gospel, that if accepted, is eternity-altering. I find that Boston is still a city of possibility, but rather than a city that can offer me temporary solutions to my personal desires for success and this vague idea of “fulfillment,” it is actually a city filled with the possibility of reuniting people looking for something with their heavenly father who is seeking to find them and bring them back to their true home. A city doesn’t often offer community, in fact its cramped living quarters, small stores, and limited parking seem to only have space for individuals living their own lives, pursuing their own goals. But my experience of church-planting in Boston has completely changed the city as I instead pursue God’s vision for the city: to bring these college students and graduates back home.
Return of the Prodigal Son - painting by Remembrandt
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