A Gift through Sadness, an Identity Through Experience
By: Tyler Bender
Tyler is from Indianapolis, Indiana, USA. He is a graduating senior at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama and currently is a journalism/marketing intern for ecumininet™ online! Tyler has a passion for writing and music and considers the ability to communicate through words on paper and in music as a gift from God. He is interested in the deeper side of life and enjoys the diversity of all God’s people. He feels like he is being “sharpened,” most when he is asking tough questions to people whose beliefs are different from his own.

“Where we’ve gotten mixed up is that we believe actions follow belief. But experience creates belief,” – Rev. Cecil Williams.

As a college student, I have been taught and told what is to come after school. I have heard about a “real world.” I have learned how people like me are supposed to be the sweat, the brains, and the leaders of our world in the next five to ten years.

College is supposed to prepare a person for these responsibilities but between the daily grind of class, social networking, and providing the groundwork for a career, it can be hard for a college student to think about whom they are and what they can give back. I have discovered that the actual process of finding my identity has helped me realize what I am capable of giving.

In the second semester of my senior year at Samford University, in the course of five weeks my family and I suffered through six deaths at six different times. Three of them began with going home for my great grandmother’s funeral at the beginning of March. It was really time for spring break. It was time to get away and spend a week in Florida with my friends relaxing and getting my mind off of school and the loss of my great grandmother.

The day I was leaving campus to drive to Florida, I received a phone call from my mother saying that her brother, my uncle, had died. He had suffered a heart attack in the middle of the night while he was sleeping. My plans had immediately changed and I was leaving my friends to drive further south to be with my family for another funeral. A few days after seeing my family distraught over my uncle’s death, I received yet another phone call that one of my close friends the National Guard had been killed in Afghanistan in the war on terror.

Every time I’ve ever felt abandoned by someone, or hurt by someone, I have run away. I close off and become emotionless to the people who remain around me and love me. People don’t like being hurt, and I, obviously, am included in that broad dynamic.

Of course anger ensued, but who is to blame for something like death? Who is to blame when I have an idea of how life is supposed to be lived and that image comes crashing down? God? Me? The rest of the world? I blamed all of the above at one point or another. Everything I believed on life, religion, people, rights/wrongs, and the good and bad of society came into question and turned into doubt.

Through all of the loss and heartache, the best thing anyone said to me in attempt to encourage me was, “this all could be happening because you might be called to or be able to help someone else someday.” Those words made the fight to not let “life happen” to me a much easier thing for me to accept.

When the question of “Why?” or “Why me?’ stops and the question of “When?” or “What can I do?” becomes the issue at the forefront of my mind, I can truly form beliefs and form who I am and who I want to be. It was not until I was completely lost and broken that I realized that I was capable of giving something to someone, even if I didn’t see immediate answers for the pain I was enduring.

I am a young adult and have life coming at me at all different angles. To discover that I am capable of giving something to someone because of my experience is quite a relief. I realized that if I let life happen to me, if I let school, work, stress, begin to form my beliefs and my identity, I am doomed. I live a healthier lifestyle when I am forming what I believe based on my experience.

A year of frustration allowed me to understand that I am capable of learning and giving of myself because of my difficulties. There isn’t a better feeling than knowing the truth of my identity and my capability. There isn’t a better feeling than knowing that it is who I am, and what I believe that has been gathered, solidified and forged by my experience.

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