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Paul sobbed as he prayed, "God, I need to know that you forgive me." Though he and his girlfriend had ended their addictive sexual relationship several months earlier, he could not quite believe God had forgiven him. Reciting the words from a Graham Kendrick song we often sang—"And now the love of God shall flow like rivers. Come wash your guilt away: Live again!"—he looked into our eyes and confessed, "I need that kind of cleansing."

Lisa had experienced God's grace in her life. Even so, she could not escape the sense that she needed to earn God's approval and that her efforts were never quite good enough. I understood her problem better when she told me her wealthy grandfather, who had paid her older brother's way through Harvard, had let her know he had no interest in paying for her Harvard education. "If I had been a boy … " she began, her voice trailing off.

Karen had hated her dad since age three when her father left her mother. Now a college junior, she began to see for the first time the connection between, on the one hand, her cynicism and depression and, on the other, the anger she had carried inside her for years. Looking at me with a mixture of disbelief and hope as I described what it might be like to relate to others with genuine openness and joy, she asked, "But how can I ever forgive him?"

These three conversations took place during one typical week in my work as an InterVarsity staff member at Harvard. In these students I see myself—and a whole generation. Each is bright, likable, and deeply broken. Each shares in a toxic intersection of brokenness and sin—and, I believe, incredible hope. This is ministry Generation-X style.

Conceived in debt
There are many ways to describe the current cohort of college students. My age group (born between 1965 and 1985) has been called "Generation X" by the baby boomer-dominated media, being portrayed variously as slackers and activists, grunge kids and techno whizzes, passive MTV consumers and creative artists. I have come to see my generation, though, as a generation of debtors—both in that we are owed debts that will never be paid and in that we owe debts we can never pay.

The most obvious debt is the national one—$5 trillion and increasing every day by $700 million—an economic cloud that looms over our future. This debt represents vast promises—world security, social security, medical care—made without the resources to keep them, and it fuels much of the economic cynicism of my generation.

In one sense, the national debt is ours: it will fall to us to pay it, if we can. But because we were so young when it was amassed, we also sense that the national debt is owed to us—as promises made to us that will never be fulfilled. Our parents have sowed the wind, and we have reaped the whirlwind.

The national debt symbolizes, though, a deeper emptiness that forms what I would call the "core experiences" of this generation. These experiences of pain are lodged at the heart of who they are, in the innermost chambers of their identities and memories; and like the core of an apple, they contain the seeds of their actions, attitudes, hopes, and fears.

As with Karen, most of the core experiences of pain of this generation have to do with the lack of true family. Many grew up without both parents physically present; even more grew up with at least one parent emotionally absent. A vast number never experienced love and acceptance from their fathers, at least in a way that they could receive it.

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November 11 1996, Vol. 40, No. 13