Common Application Essay

Evaluate a significant experience, achievement, risk you have taken, or ethical dilemma you have faced and its impact on you.




What to do?



Imagine walking everywhere you go for your daily routine. You are under 14, but you still walk by yourself or with your friends, because no adult has the time or desire to walk you to where you need to go. You live in Manhattan, but more specifically, Washington Heights. You’re walking home from this new park you went to explore with your friends. Walking home you come across a group of guys, who are mostly in their late teens. They say you are on their territory. They say you made a mistake. They throw you to the ground. They kick you. They punch you. What do you do?



These were the kids that we spent time with, the victims. During the Briarwood Youth Group’s mission trip to New York, we had one week to reach out to fifty kids from a similar background. Five days to share with them the love of God, and to show them that all was not lost, that they could ask forgiveness for the things they had done. Just try to comprehend the idea of relating to kids whom almost daily experienced things that most of us had only seen in movies and television shows. We had no specific goal, no quota to meet, only the desire to love these kids. I still, a month after this expedition, cannot grasp the concept of having to walk home in fear of being jumped or attacked.



I value my relationship with God above all else. He comes first and last and everywhere in between, and His mission is for me to share His message and love to the rest of the world. The experience of those five days, starting with each of the kids verbally demonstrating his or her hatred towards me, was the most significant event I ever have been through. By the end of those five days something had changed. At the end of Friday I did not want to leave. Each of the kids now begged me to stay, told me how he loved me, how she would miss me, and how he wanted me to come back next year.



I look back at this week, five days with these kids, and wonder what happened. How did I change? Going into New York, I thought of myself as the one holding all the gifts. I was the privileged one. I thought that it would take far more than just me and my team to get these kids to realize what we were trying to bring to them. After I left New York, I was humbled. I saw that despite my materialistic blessing, I was in the same spiritual position as them. I was lost. I was in the same sinking boat as them. Yet because of their material “lacking” they were far more able to accept a saving love and grace that is just beyond all measure. They needed it. They were at the bottom of the boat, seeing the water and hopelessness rushing in around them. They had nothing else. God spoke to them and they accepted it. Seeing this caused me to see the flaws in my initial perspective. I was blind to myself, and then that blindness was removed. I was so humbled just watching this take place all around me, not expecting any responses. I saw an overflow of love and its reception that reminded me of just how great His love is.



Imagine you are a are 14 year old girl and just broke up with your boyfriend because he is stuck in a gang. He says they will kill them if he tries to leave. Every Halloween he must go door-to-door with the gang and pretend to trick or treat, and if someone answers, he must slit his or her throats. Graphically stark. You, the girl, cannot even open the door on Halloween. You cannot hang out with your friends after dark. You must be home. What more can we do for them, the girl and the boy?