I think it’s safe to say by now that if you didn’t attend Step Forward Day on Saturday, you missed out on one of the most fulfilling days you could possibly experience during your brief stay on planet Earth; and that’s not hyperbolic language.
(Side-note: Hyperbole would better explain the tone of those here at Pepperdine who speak about their semester class schedules. “It’s seriously the most bomb schedule ever, man. Like, if AKB found out about it, I feel like he’d call me into his office and reprimand me; it’s that good.” Or, “I think they, and I’m speaking literally here, gave me a schedule from the fourth or fifth rung of hell.”)
I admit, initially I had my reservations. Sure, standing around the Smothers parking lot at 6:45 a.m. next to a table of stale bagels (stacked with the careful regard of a DEA agent conducting a search) is nowhere on my bucket list. Couple that with the fact that everyone looked like a family reunion straight out of MTV’s “Teen Mom” with their matching shirts, and you have the makings of a terrible day. But you would be wrong — very, very wrong.
Step Forward Day was special. When else do you get to hang out with hundreds of kids your own age and help make the world a better place?
All I could think about as the group boarded the school buses in pure jubilation was how much my friends sleeping at home were missing. What my group ended up accomplishing in four and a half hours is something I won’t soon forget.
I healed the swollen ankle of an injured doe with the fabric of my T-shirt, and nursed it back to health with a bottle of Gatorade and a two-pack of Pop-Tarts. My friend David helped a woman in labor give birth to two sets of triplets (so … sixlets) after we convinced her she couldn’t make it to a hospital in time. We both then worked as a team to scale a two-story building and, through a makeshift, yet intricate, system of pulleys and levers, saved a 104-year-old woman from a flaming apartment. As we rappelled down the building, I talked a man off the third floor ledge and into a career in the culinary arts. And that was all just on our walk to registration.
On the bus ride to our destination, someone near me saw what they could only describe as “a suspicious vehicle” on the side of the road, forced the driver to pull over, and then risked life and limb to stop a terror plot near the 101. As we were waiting for her to come back to the bus, a woman lost the handle of a baby carriage containing an infant and all his classmates. The stroller went careening into oncoming traffic, and, if it weren’t for the gallantry of Mitchell Snow, they would have been struck by a steamroller. But it was Step Forward Day, and Mitchell swooped them into safety at the very last second.
When we finally arrived at our location, a novel idea came rushing into my head. I don’t want to put the cart before the horse here, and it’s not official yet, but I’m pretty sure I came up with a way to cure HIV/AIDS. Now call me crazy, but if we simply isolated the CD4 lymphocyte, then extracted the virus from the dormant cells without fully activating them throughout the immune system, we could wipe out the disease altogether. But what do I know? I’m just an English major.
By the time I got off the phone with the Mayo Clinic, the group as a whole was ready to sand and apply primer to the offices of a self-help organization called SHARE. We did that for about four hours before heading back to Pepperdine for some In-N-Out Burger.
Sure, not all of Step Forward Day was glamorous or exhilarating, but I would hate to know that feeling of waking up at 10:30 a.m. to an empty dorm hall and conscience riddled with the kind of guilt that lesser men have thrown themselves to the sea over. But that’s just me.
Either way, there’s always next year. Until then, who says we can’t take small steps forward with every moment of our lives? The difference between the way the world is and the way the world should be is vast, too vast, in fact. As Mother Teresa once said, we all should hope to be “little pencils in the hand of a God writing a love letter to the world.”
