Last Thursday, Epic Movement (the college ministry I work for) had a free bubble tea event at University of Maryland College Park.

It’s easy for me to get pretty ambitious with these sorts of things, so I really pushed for us to make the bubble tea ourselves, as opposed to getting it catered from this nearby place called Ten Ren Tea. After all, it would save us hundreds of dollars. The fact that none of us had ever made bubble tea was irrelevant.

And so the team let me take this task on as a little pet project, and I literally experimented with the recipe for hours during the days before the event. The actual drink was pretty easy to make (6 tbsp Chinese tea, 1 tbsp whole milk, 2 tsp sugar was my perfected ratio), but the tapioca balls were a nightmare. After a few tries, I managed to make some that were decent, but I was doubtful of how I would be able to mass produce them in just a few hours (if they sit in the fridge for several hours, they start to harden up).

And so Thursday comes around, and I’m cooking away in the basement of Oakland Hall like I’m a MasterChef contestant or something. I won’t go into the details, but essentially the tapioca balls weren’t too amazing.

The rest of the staff team came in to taste everything, and I made sure to go on and on about how horrible the tapioca balls were in order to lower their expectations. And sure enough, they gave mediocre reviews. “Oh it’s not too bad! It’s not the best, but I think it’s passable.” However, Mary, one of the staff members, was more in tune with reality, giving semi-negative reviews but at the same time semi-justifying the situation, “I think it’s because I just had Ten Ren.”

Fast forward a few hectic hours, and we had run out of bubble tea in 45 minutes. Most people loved the drink but not the bubbles, and those who really loved the bubble tea were those who never had bubble tea before. We also had a friendly proxe-station-esque booth with the question, “What do you want to do at UMCP before you graduate?” written on a huge poster, and students were encouraged to grab a marker and publicly write their answers. We also raffled off 2 “mysterious bags of awesome things” (which included everything from Starbucks cards to The Reason for God books to pencil lead to cough drops), which was really just a ploy to get everybody’s attention, because right afterward I gave a 5-minute spiel about what Epic was. We ended up having 85 students give us their contact info. Pretty good gig.

I was looking at the huge poster that we set up afterward, where students were supposed to answer that question about what they wanted to do at UMCP, and there was a very wide variety of responses. It ranged from “live in Oakland Hall” (which is one of the nicer dorms on campus) to “see the Redskins win the Super Bowl.” Most of the answers, frankly, were not very visionary. There weren’t enough things like “lead a Bible study for non-Christians” or “discover my purpose in life.” It was all very ordinary.

I was thinking about it all afterward, and I’m realizing that this generation of college students (of which I once belonged) lacks good living standards more so than perhaps any other generation before. I don’t mean living standards in a socioeconomic sense but in a spiritual, psychological sense. College students have low standards for the big questions in life. Why do you do what you do?  What are your goals and dreams? What are you living for?

Over and over, in my limited college ministry experience, I’ve tried to push college students by asking hard questions, and many of them not only give me shallow answers, but they don’t even see any problems with their answers. I remember asking somebody several months ago what it was that motivated him to get out of bed in the morning. He said he didn’t know. I asked him if that was bothersome at all, and he said he didn’t really care all too much.

But how do you get college students to adopt higher living standards?

When Mary tasted my tapicoa balls and said, “I think it’s because I just had Ten Ren,” there was a profound truth in that statement. The reason my bubble tea didn’t live up to her standards was because she just experienced a higher standard. And the reason my bubble tea did live up to the standards of some was because they didn’t have much of a standard.

It reminded me of Isaiah 55:2, where God says, “Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen diligently to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food.” In other words, “Don’t spend all of this time and effort making your own sorry tapioca balls. I’m giving you my own bubble tea, and it’s free.” God is talking to people with low standards, and He is challenging them to adopt a higher standard. He is asking them to come to Him and experience something infinitely greater than what they know.

The purpose of our lives can be greater than to see the Redskins win the Super Bowl. It can be to experience a dynamic relationship with our Creator. But for those who have never experienced God, or for those of us who haven’t experienced God in a long time, it is just natural to settle for small temporal dreams, because that’s all we know. I often find myself settling for things I thought I had left behind when I gave my life to Christ.

I need to keep going back to Ten Ren, metaphorically, to remind myself of how it tastes. I need to be tasting and seeing that the Lord is good, or else fleeting worldly pleasures will seem good to me.

As Thomas Chalmers says, “The heart must have something to cling to—and never, by its voluntary consent, will the heart so detach itself from all its attachments that there shall not be one remaining object that can draw its attention or solicit its affections. The love of the world cannot be removed by a mere demonstration of the world’s worthlessness. The only way to dispossess the heart of an old affection is by the expulsive power of a new affection. We know of no other way by which to keep the love of the world out of our hearts than to keep in our hearts the love of God.”

Larry