I was completely alone the first time I ever got drunk. I had rushed a fraternity toward the end of my sophomore year, and, much to my surprise, received a bid.
Coming out of high school, I was the youth group kid who moshed at Christian concerts by night and wore matching WWJD bracelets by day. Not exactly premium frat guy material at the University of South Carolina. But here I was, a stadium cup half-full of Captain Morgan’s rum, my bedroom spinning as I slipped into a state so familiar to many of my brothers, yet totally new to me. I was experiencing the “spins,” the alcohol-fueled experience when you are completely still while everything around you spins out of control.
College is a season of change. Almost everything will be different: your location, friends, routines, interests. Few have described the college experience better than University of Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith:
To an extent matched by no other time in the life course, [college students] enjoy and endure multiple, layered, big, and often unanticipated life transitions. They move out, they move back, they plan to move out again.…They meet new friends, their old friends change, their friends don’t get along, they meet more new people. They get new roommates, their roommates don’t work out, they find a new apartment…They find their soulmate, they get involved, their soulmate dumps them, they are crushed. They believe in saving sex for meaningful relationships, they hook up, they get angry with themselves, they look for a meaningful relationship. In these and other ways, for [college students] not a lot in life is stable or enduring.
So much of what Smith describes resembles what the preacher in Ecclesiastes calls the emptiness of pleasure. The ways in which we knock on the door of alcohol, sex, porn, or, as often was my case in college, a Wendy’s Spicy Chicken #6 combo, hoping the door opens to something that will give us at least a momentary feeling that our life is worth living and that we are enough.
But the door never opens. Or it does, but it’s not what we quite expected. The preacher in Ecclesiastes describes this feeling:
I said to myself, “Come now, I will test you with pleasure to find out what is good.” But that also proved to be meaningless. “Laughter,” I said, “is madness. And what does pleasure accomplish?” I tried cheering myself with wine, and embracing folly… I denied myself nothing my eyes desired; I refused my heart no pleasure…Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind (Ecclesiastes 2:1-11).
He knocked, and knocked, and knocked at the door of pleasure, only to find no one was home.
G.K. Chesterton once wrote, “Every man who knocks on the door of a brothel is looking for God.” I know what he means. Not because I’ve been to a brothel, but because I’ve felt the ways my own heart hunts for pleasure almost everywhere but God. Never more than in my college years.
I knocked at the door of porn, and only shame and guilt were home. I knocked at the door of drunkenness, and only loneliness and embarrassment were home. I knocked at the door of Wendy’s, quite literally, and found only emptiness and hatredness toward my body. There were more doors, but no one home to know me truly, to love me fully.
It’s not that Wendy’s was the problem. Their Spicy Chicken combo has been there for me in so many painful and joyful moments, including the birth of my first daughter. Alcohol isn’t the problem. The psalmist tells us that wine “gladdens the heart,” a phrase I’ve seen proudly displayed on decorative kitchen towels. It’s not that sex is the problem. Have you ever read the Song of Solomon? I don’t recommend it for family devotional time.
The answer to keeping your heart and eyes fixed on Jesus in your college years isn’t by carefully avoiding every possible temptation you might possibly face. Temptation is part of the human experience. As Paul wrote, “No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man” (1 Corinthians 10:13). If you feel tempted at college, it’s because you are human.
The answer is in being ruthlessly honest with your own heart. Why do I find myself daydreaming about this particular source of pleasure? Why do I think this particular pleasure might be more fulfilling than Jesus? Why isn’t Jesus enough for me? Do I think I’m too much for Him?
I don’t recommend doing this type of reflection alone. Find a church home, a ministry home, and a group of close friends who are willing to ask these questions with you. At RUF, we always say that our hope is that students might find Jesus to be more beautiful, and more believable, than they’ve ever known before. It’s only as Jesus becomes more beautiful and believable – through the steady, if sometimes mundane, experience of the means of His grace – that you and I have a chance for worldly pleasures to find their godly place.
Here’s the hardest part: Sometimes you’ll really believe the gospel to be true, but you’re not sure it’s enough. There’s good news and bad news here. The good news is that it’s not a surprise to the Lord. He chose us and loves us, with both eyes open. He knows what we are, and where we are. It is his joyful, steady work in our lives to sober us up to what John Newton calls “the hidden evils in our hearts.” He does this so we might repent, believe the gospel, and become more and more like Jesus through the faithful work of his Spirit.
College doesn’t change your heart; it reveals it. This is the tougher pill to swallow. In my case, it was the revelation that high school me, decked out in all the WWJD’s, and college me, walking the plank with Captain Morgan, weren’t actually that different. Both versions were desperate for approval, it’s just that the audience had changed.
Youth group approval is a very different thing than fraternity approval. What looked like me being on fire for Jesus in high school wasn’t really about Jesus at all. It was about me, how I felt, and how I was perceived. I know it now as self-righteousness, which is a powerful drug.
This is bad news, but it actually can be more good news if you let it. It’s what the Puritans used to call “downward growth.” It’s not that you’ve actually gotten worse. It’s that you’ve begun to see yourself as you actually are, a great sinner in need of greater grace. It’s the way that Jesus sees you, a sinner in desperate need of saving. And he’s a Savior deeply glad to save.
This is where real pleasure is found, in the astounding grace of God. It’s the only door we can knock at and find there is Someone home. Someone who knows the full extent of our sinfulness, yet loves us.
It’s the same Someone that the Samaritan woman found by her well. She drew near with her leaky water pot, and met Living Water whose streams of mercy never run dry. Someone who knew “all that she ever did,” yet chose her. Revival broke out because she went and told fellow pleasure-seekers about Someone who can truly satisfy. Like her, we can leave our leaky water pots behind, because we’ve found Living Water, the real pleasure of being known and loved.
It’s what the younger brother found after all of his wandering in the far country (Luke 15:11-32). All the pleasure money could buy left his heart unquenched. He had knocked at all the old doors. He didn’t yet realize he had someone waiting at home, a father who loved him more deeply than he knew.
In Psalm 16, David (no stranger to looking for pleasure in empty places) sings:
Preserve me, O God, for in you I take refuge. I say to the LORD, “You are my Lord; I have no good apart from you.” …Therefore my heart is glad, and my whole being rejoices; my flesh also dwells secure. For you will not abandon my soul to Sheol, or let your holy one see corruption. You make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore (vs. 1, 9-10).
“At your right hand are pleasures forevermore.” Do you know who is at the right hand of the Father? The Lord Jesus. He welcomes weary pleasure-seekers to come find the lasting pleasures of being known and loved by him. And by God’s grace, we knock to find there is Someone who has been waiting for us.
Sammy Rhodes serves as campus minister for Reformed University Fellowship at the University of South Carolina. He is the author of This Is Awkward and Broken and Beloved.
Read the other articles in our Following Christ in College series here:
Why College Students Need The Local Church
Learning From Failure While Pursuing Success
Knowledge, Wisdom, and Fearing God