Education emerges from life’s failures and successes. Something to remember during this pandemic.

A few years back, a young student taught me a lesson about the exquisite trinity of vulnerability, hurt, and fine writing.

She wanted to write about her brush with suicide; I feared the consequences. I was so worried about her and about making a mistake in allowing her to publish her article online for all to read that I felt sick at heart. She was hurting. I was hurting. But her writing was flourishing.

The story began one evening during the fall semester. I received the first draft of an assignment from a student named Sarah. As I read it, my heart started to hurt.

“Let me begin with what this piece is not about,” she wrote. “This is not about Jesus curing my mental illness, it’s not about Christianity changing my life, and it’s not about miracles. This is, however, about pain. Disillusionment about faith, Christian colleges, and churches. It’s ugly and has no clean solutions, like most of life. Nevertheless, we keep going.”

She shared her story of being an Asian-American with Taiwanese roots struggling in Los Angeles to discover her identity. Now, she was many miles from home as a first-year student at a nearly all-white Christian college. After a few months, depression gripped her like a vise and wouldn’t let go. In desperation, she got drunk, returned to her dorm room and injured herself. Fortunately, her roommate intervened. Eventually, Sarah withdrew from school and sought treatment.

She recovered enough to return to school, but her emotional life was wounded with many wounds.

“Love is not a victory march. It’s a cold and broken hallelujah,” she concluded, quoting lyricist Leonard Cohen. After publication online, the response from other students, her family, and strangers was staggering and positive. That article engaged more people than almost anything else we published that semester. She also had started weekly trips to Chinatown to teach English to new immigrants — this helped her to heal for at least a season.

As I come to know myself better in the face of hurts, I become a better journalist, educator, and person. It goes back to my faith in the crucified and resurrected Christ, and my willingness to address the hurts of my students. This is especially true this year with the coronavirus when so many are faced with life-changing loss.

The counselor and author Dan Allender wrote, “None of us escapes the heartache and disappointments of life. To live is to hurt, and we all have the wounds to prove it. Regardless of how we’ve been hurt, we all face a common question: What should we do with our pain? Should we stoically ignore it? Should we just ’get over it?’ Should we let it ‘make us stronger?’ Should we optimistically hope that everything will work out in the end? If we fail to respond appropriately to the wounds that life and relationships inflict, our pain will be wasted; it will numb us or destroy us.” Sometimes, we need the help of a counselor or a good editor.

Mutual transformation

My experience became an affirmation of a conviction that I have about writers and editors.  Every Albert Einstein needs a Max Planck. When Einstein sought publication of his four “miracle year” articles on the theory of relativity, photoelectricity, and related topics in 1905, he was unknown in the prestigious circles of science. Planck was already world-famous and on the editorial board of the journal Annals of Physics (Annalen der Physik) that received these articles. Planck recognized Einstein’s genius and became an important influence in gaining Einstein an audience.

The writer needs a first reader, an editor who becomes such an advocate that he is determined to improve every sentence and idea in an article. This intense, very personal process brings the writer and the reader together, changing both. It can lead to “reciprocal transformation,” a term I learned from a physician who treats people with HIV.

“The writer needs a first reader.”

One of the most under-appreciated elements in our system of education is learning about self. A person needs to make a clear choice to learn what he is capable of knowing and able to achieve in life. Just as a sprinter desires to run faster by running better, we must train and strain ourselves to gain greater skill, acquire new knowledge, and experience more of our sometimes inglorious and complex world. As we come to hurdles and falls, we progress as humans by working through the stumbles and bumbles.

However, we likely won’t get to this level of learning unless we take the time to figure out why we are doing it. Why is knowledge greater than ignorance? Why is wisdom a goal more precious than gold? Why should we love the neighbor who might hate us and throws blockages in front of us? The tried and true answers to life’s deepest questions will ring hollow unless we use our own words to describe our struggles. Self-discovery is essential to living life to its fullest.

“Use your own words.”

The role of teacher as guide is one of the most ancient and celebrated of all social positions. From books like the Bible, we also see that it is considered a part of the divine character. “Behold, God is exalted in his power; who is a teacher like him?” (ESV) In Job 36, Elihu says these words to Job to proclaim the greatness of God. It is but one short but powerful verse in one of the Bible’s great prophetic monologues.

No one except God is a teacher from day one. It took Job tremendous suffering and reflection to actually become a teacher of his colleagues. Job said that the good and almighty God had allowed his suffering to teach some of the harshest lessons about life. These lessons Job could teach to his friends. To teach means to suffer like our students. Every teacher who seeks to master the art of instruction must also be a student of suffering. It is truly a prerequisite for the educator, who then is the person who seeks to “draw out” learning from the student.

Evil, empathy, and risk-taking

A simple question, “What are you going to do about evil?” pushes one to have more empathy with victims and to take risks to provide an answer.

My own educational journey has been greatly shaped by learning about genocide, though I have never personally experienced it.

As a high schooler, I started to consider my personal response to mass killings after seeing the play “The Diary of Anne Frank.” The young Jewish girl recorded her own experience of living under the threat of the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis. Later, while traveling in Europe for 12 weeks one summer during college, I was drawn to a visit the place at Amsterdam in which Anne Frank hid before she was exposed and sent to die in a concentration camp in Germany. I then visited the Dachau death camp thinking about the young girl who ended up in a similar camp.

Early in my career as a journalist, I interviewed and befriended a Jewish Holocaust survivor from Holland who lost her parents and most of her extended family in the death camps. Later, I visited Rwanda four times to interview survivors of that country’s holocaust as well as some of the tens of thousands of killers stuffed into overcrowded prisons.

I noticed that world leaders are eager to announce “never again” will they allow a massive genocide like the one in Germany, but basically ignore the smaller genocides in remote corners of the earth like those in Sudan’s Darfur region or Myanmar. In such horrific moments, we must realize that learning about evil is insufficient. It’s not enough to be informed. How many times have you seen posted on social media the Albert Einstein quote that has remained ineffective in overcoming our inaction against evil: “The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them and don’t do anything.”

From childhood, many of us are taught to “overcome evil with good.” The Apostle Paul explored this idea in the famous chapter 12 of his Letter to the Romans. Yet, seldom do our Bible teachers explore how to do “overcoming evil with good” in our contemporary genocides.

“Learn how to overcome evil with good.”

We can learn how to move from recognition to action by practicing empathy in our education. The idea of empathy can be taught, but it can only be “caught” by taking risks to realize its implied actions. Empathy is like a muscle in your heart that you have to train through rigorous workouts.

Not long ago, my capacity for empathy faced an extreme test. While traveling through the genocide sites in Rwanda, I was drawn back to the words of the English scientist, Francis Bacon: “Truth emerges more readily from error than confusion.” He meant that when we recognize our big errors, the education of our mindset takes a giant leap. How could we have been so mistaken to not see the Rwandan holocaust coming? The healing afterward also took me by surprise.

I eventually chronicled my trips in a Christianity Today article titled “Healing Genocide.” I shared the story of a Rwandan woman, Deborah Niyakabirika, whose son was murdered in the aftermath of the genocide in 1994. One morning, after her daily prayer time, a young man came to the woman’s dwelling and he confessed. She recounted for me the dialogue that ensued:

“I killed your son,” he said. “Take me to the authorities and let them deal with me as they will. I have not slept since I shot him. Every time I lie down I see you praying, and I know you are praying for me.”

Deborah answered, “You are no longer an animal but a man taking responsibility for your actions. I do not want to add death to death.”

Then Deborah did the extraordinary. “But I want you to restore justice by replacing the son you killed,” she continued. “I am asking you to become my son. When you visit me, I will care for you.”

Today, that young man is an adopted member of her household.

This young man was not confused but deep in moral error. The mother showed an empathy that was so deep and broad like a love of God. In Rwanda, I found a new home among the hurting and discovered really fresh ways to write about exceptional love and self-sacrifice in the face of evil. To learn deeply, we will need to personally face the suffering that goes beyond anything that we have experienced. We will then be able to write with depth and verve that expands beyond our previous capabilities. We will learn, as it were, a new language for existence.

A culture of learners

Learning achieves its greatest goals through authentic, creative language. We usually visualize learning with images of paper, pens, keyboards, and desks. But our use of language in learning is greatly enhanced when we use language in a holistic way that invokes our empathy with others. The smile on a human face is a universally recognized use of body language to communicate goodwill and friendship. The word hunger shows up in at least 80 languages and communicates something we all experience daily. The concept of justice can be an image, an individual word, a law, and an action. These all have a transcendent quality that go beyond the classroom. Amidst the paper, pens, keyboards, and desks, the lessons of empathy with the hurting tie our education and its accoutrements to the big questions of the universe.

When education embraces a deep level of learning about the human condition, intelligence, wisdom, and skill are in harmony. Achievements beyond our imagination become dreams fulfilled. When we accept the challenge of becoming a culture of learners, we agree that the individual good should never be sold off or bartered for the common good no matter how bad the circumstances that we find ourselves in.

We can see this holistic tying of the individual and the social good in examples from popular culture. In one of my favorite films, “Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan,” the dying Vulcan Spock, who had just saved the starship Enterprise by sacrificing his own life, says to Capt. James T. Kirk, “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. I shall always be your friend.” But a few years later when “Star Trek III-The Search for Spock” was released, the film’s core message is finally revealed as “the needs of the one outweigh the needs of many.” Captain Kirk and his shipmates risk everything to bring about the resurrection of Spock on the planet Vulcan. To be fully human means living in the ever-shifting balance between individual human rights and the greater good of all.

The benchmarks of my philosophy of education come from the values emerging from life’s failures and successes in overcoming the hurts. In “The Wounded Healer,” the late Henri Nouwen wrote, “The beginning and the end of all Christian leadership is to give your life for others.” He nails it. Yes, evil is real, but God’s love is stronger. Having sacrificed His son for our rescue, God calls us too to have a sacrificial love to rescue others.

“The beginning and the end of all Christian leadership is to give your life for others.”

Timothy Morgan is on the board of directors of A Journey through NYC religions. He has been a journalist since 1979, working for a newspaper, Global and Deputy Managing Editor of Christianity Today, and Director of the Journalism Certificate Program at Wheaton College in Illinois.