Threshing

“We can do no great things, only small things with great love” –Mother Theresa

A few weeks ago, I was traipsing around Barnes and Noble (which seems to be all I ever do in that store) and picked up a book on Millenials. I chuckled because it was in the “Christian Inspiration” section, and I wondered what the chunk of us folks born between 1980 and 2000 had to do with Christian inspiration. In my interest, I found that as they interviewed around 1200 millenials (or something like that) that 96% of them believed that they would do something “great.” We millies have also officially passed the baby boomer generation in size. Lastly, I learned (just from reading the back cover) that only 13% of those millenials find spirituality to be important. Makes sense—when you sit there believing in yourself all day, why do you need God? And what will it look like as we continue to surpass the baby boomers in size and thus dominate the culture with all this believing and lack of belief?

What will America look like as a room full of people who never left the “look at me” stage and they are all convinced that they are the best thing the world has ever seen. And what will happen as the mass of us who grew up watching movies, reading novels, and soaking music through our pours assuring that “you” will be the one to beat the crowd and stand out? After all, if all 78 million of us stand out from the crowd, none of us will be stand out, eh?

Don’t get me wrong—I too am subject to that twinge in my gut that says everything’s going to work out, that I will stumble upon the big dreams that run in and out of my head. When I see a quote like this one by Mother Theresa, I begin to imagine whether or not I should go live in the slums and feed the poor like she did. Wait, why can’t I just end world hunger altogether? Why not? I’m a millennial, for crying out loud. It’s not my fault that my grade-school teachers put all those cheesy posters all over the place about believing and (are you ready for the rhyme?) achieving. I guess I’ve always had big dreams, but I have also learned that my biggest dreams were microscope-sized compared to the scope of the Gospel. We are a generation believing for “great” things, but I’m afraid we don’t know what true greatness is.

For me, getting through college has been about grasping the reality of true greatness. This is what I would be staring out the window thinking about—not quite being able to articulate it in my head—in classes like “History of Christian Thought.” The reality is that 98% of the population in medieval Europe was comprised of serfs. Nothings—that’s what “serfs” means to us generation Y’s (aka Millenials). We have been pulled from the crib believing that “I” will be in that 2% of nobility. Ninety-six percent of us believe they will be in the top 2%, and 4% of us believe they will be in the bottom 98. To a millennial, there is no value in being a serf. And if a fifteen-year-old millennial was in charge of population control back then, maybe that 98% wouldn’t even be there—after all, they don’t matter. He believes he’s going to be a noble anyway.

I even remember learning about medieval Europe in seventh grade or so and not being able to imagine what it would be like being a lousy serf hammering out a meager existence working the land of my lord. I tried not address the fact that the Middle Ages were not exactly a romantic or magical time for that 98%. They lived in a time of harsh reality. For me, magic was appealing because I believed it could happen to me.

But while life is good, it’s not magic, friend.

While the serfs worked on the land of their lord, they also knew that they worked the land of their Lord. I would guess that they, unlike us, knew that they were nothings with no political prospects, meager wages and a short life expectancy. But they were (and are) each minute parts of God’s grand tapestry. One sacrament at a time, the Roman Catholic Church ushered them through a lifetime of pursuing God’s kingdom. One stage at a time, a serf learned their life’s trade with the ultimate goal of developing virtue—habits that produced goodness in one’s nature. Why be good? Well, Hell was a pretty good threat, and purgatory probably didn’t sound too appetizing either. But, threats aside, what’s the real reason to live well? God is good, and we live on His land. Love is the source of all virtue, and while we can only love with God’s grace, the serfs did lots of negligible things with goal of ultimately doing them with great love.

Throughout college, I’ve slowly realize that I’m not going to be a noble. I’ll let myself get cocky for a minute and imagine that I will be in the top fifty percent in terms of greatness—hey, what if I strike gold and get up into the eighties? Yep, I’m still a serf. I’m a nothing. I will not be one in a million; I am just one in a family of 78 million. I will not be “great,” so now what?

This is the part of the show where perhaps one of my generation-X superiors reassures me that I will do great things someday. I will be president; I will receive an academy award; I will find the cure for cancer; my blog will have a million followers. Okay people, I have two. The question of the hour for this millennial is: So now what? Will I pull out the stops, doing whatever it takes to collect a million followers for my blog—abandoning all sensibilities to woo the internet world? Is this what my generation is going to look like? Will we throw all sensibilities to the wind and take our culture by storm with our stage-show antics? We’ve replaced our belief in God with our belief in being “great.” But what is “great,” anyways?

Throughout history, I would guess that at least 98% of the population are people whose names are lost forever. I will probably be one of those unless I do something to make everybody really (really, really, really) mad at me. But since I’m hoping not to do that, my name will probably be forgotten once my third generation or so of offspring die off with the stories of their crazy great-great grandmother dying with them. (But, while we’re on offspring, let us post-feminism women never forget that the call to motherhood is not only because we “want” kids—it’s the most phenomenal of chances to bring God’s creation into the world and care for it in a way that no one else but us can. So cool it.)

Maybe I’ll just leave it to the remarkable ones. After all, there’s a certain freedom in being a serf. Living on God’s land is about learning to love—and it’s a good thing no one’s busy watching me because that’s going to take a while. Threshing God’s wheat in my daily grind for existence is for the ultimate purpose of learning to love. And while the political, economic, cultural world turns furiously on, let me be found threshing wheat in my Father’s field when He comes. I won’t miss a thing.

I will be the vote that no one sees, the dollar that no one misses, the poem that few people read—but let me be found threshing wheat in my Father’s field when He comes.

I feel for the flood of Millenials who don’t figure this out. Maybe 78 million of us will be blindfolded to think we did something great. Maybe we’ll end up horribly depressed by the end of our lives. Or maybe we’ll forsake the human creed for something truly great. For we can do no great things, only small things with great love.