Forged in the Fire : Young Professionals Come of Age During COVID-19
The somber scene has played out five hundred and thirty thousand times in our country since we first heard of the virus called COVID-19. This time, it plays out in our sweet hometown.
The nurse at the bedside has done her job so faithfully. She is only 24 years old, just two years out of nursing school. A few years earlier, she was a high school student, watching her own mother being pinned as a nurse. She was so proud, and she knew that she wanted to follow that path and do that noble work. Now, her own hard-earned experience tells her that another patient’s death is near. The breaths come more slowly. The pulse weakens. There will be no heroic measures, no machines to do the breathing. The virus will do its deadly work. She is a highly trained medical professional, but there is nothing in her training that can change this reality. In these days of COVID, the comfort she must so often give is not just medical, but also spiritual, emotional, and personal. A final video call for family. Her gloved hand cradling the hand of this one about to die. For a few moments more, her other work can wait. No one should have to die alone. Kylie won’t ever let that happen if it's in her power to be there.
The irony is that this nurse’s young husband is the one who “should” be there at the bedside. He is serving as a student pastor and working toward his master’s degree, being trained in the arts of pastoral care, theological reflection, congregational leadership, and preaching. But all of those things have become so hard to accomplish since the Spring of 2020. While Kylie’s work almost overwhelms her, Garrett’s work has become hard to find. His congregation now seems invisible, quarantined behind closed doors. This is not the way they imagined the beginnings of their careers.
As LaGrange College Chaplain, I got to watch them meet, and I had the privilege of seeing their relationship grow and flourish. In so many ways, they gracefully fulfilled the symbolic roles of everyone’s “Mr. and Miss LC.” They were natural leaders, attractive both inside and out. Garrett Wallace was a linebacker on the LaGrange College football team, served as the President of Wesley Fellowship, and majored in Church Leadership. He worked in youth ministry at First Presbyterian Church of LaGrange, began pursuing ordination in the United Methodist Church, and was accepted at Emory University's Candler School of Theology. Kylie Taunton was a “townie” who worked her way through the challenges of the LaGrange College Nursing School while also leading campus worship at Wesley every Tuesday night. Both of them served the community as members of the College’s “Wilkinson Family Servant Scholars” 2018 cohort.
Graduation launched them into their chosen fields of service. “I always pictured helping a church get outside its walls, out into the community,” Garrett said. As a student, Kylie had already served as a tech in the hospital's ICU. She knew the work could be grueling and, at times, even overwhelming. “I’d seen nurses struggling,” she said, “but if you’re asking what I imagined it might be like? Grey’s Anatomy. That’s what you imagine. You think it’s that dramatic and that you’ll be that into it and go above and beyond for every patient.” For the first 18 months of their work, they experienced the usual bumps that come with transitioning from college to work. Garrett adjusted to coursework at Emory and began leading his congregation toward a new vision for ministry. Kylie worked in the "Med-Surg" unit, then made a transition to Intensive Care, “the place where you can learn the most.”
That’s when COVID suddenly interrupted all of our lives. “Overnight,” Garrett said, “all that work was out the window. As a student pastor, I’m primarily charged with leading and planning worship, and now we can’t even gather. The only way I could reach many of my parishioners was by calling them on the phone and sending paper hard copies of my sermons to their homes. I wasn’t equipped to start producing videos, and my church members really weren’t able to access the internet in many cases. In the meantime, I felt cut off from my ‘brain trust’ of other student pastors. I’m watching older colleagues with better resources do things online that I can’t begin to do. It’s easy to start to feel like a failure.”
While Garrett grappled with his classes moving online and his congregation going into quarantine, Kylie stepped into a whole new and unimagined world of nursing. “Every small and big task became so much harder,” she says. “There are so many precautions you have to take each and every time you go into a room. Dressing up, dressing down, and being scared every time you go in, initially. I’m not scared anymore, but at first, it was terrifying because we thought if you’re not perfect, you’re going to be infected. It was just scary trying not to make mistakes. I was one of the first nurses to take a covid patient. Since I started as one of the first volunteers, I was kind of forced to keep going for months because there’s no reason to expose or infect others. My first COVID patient was on March 13th, 2020. I remember that day.”
Kylie says the most challenging part of working on the COVID floor was not what you might imagine. “The loneliness. There were some very lonely nights. Often I was there by myself because early on, there just really weren’t a lot of other people to call. If the patient was on a vent, it’s quiet. It’s just them and me, and it’s quiet. You learn to think ahead. You learn to think about everything you could need and everything you need to do before you go in there. In some ways, COVID slowed me down and forced me to focus on one patient, and I’d feel like I was connecting and making a difference. But then there were many times when I was just running around and doing tasks without feeling like I was doing a lot to make anybody better. And I saw a whole lot of death. And there were so many extra hoops and steps that sometimes I’d feel lost from what I was really trying to do there in the first place.”
Anxiety and depression were concepts Kylie and Garrett knew about before COVID but had never really experienced for themselves. But like all of us, they now know what those feelings are like firsthand. “I had a week in May when I was by myself for 7 or 8 days. I didn’t see another human. I talked myself into believing Kylie was going to break up with me. I knew it wasn’t real, but I was way down in a deep, dark hole.” Kylie was shocked. “I thought we were fine! I was like, wow are you kidding! Are you ok?” But she’s had her own struggles too. “There were many times I’d walk into the hospital and feel like a physical weight was sitting on my chest. Other nurses were experiencing the same thing, and finally, I realized, ‘oh, this is anxiety.’"
“There’s been so much anxiety and stress,” Garrett says. “It’s just that nobody’s gone through an event like this that just absolutely upends how we live and what we do. Everybody’s looking for some sense of hope, of normalcy. Going back through the Bible and seeing lives turned upside down but people still making it and coming out better on the other side is powerful. I want to help people see that even though this is terrible, good things can come. But, before we look for the good we need to honor the grief and loss we all feel. I remind people that it’s okay and necessary to express those emotions. A lot of people feel like they are supposed to just get over it and move on but we can’t. We have to deal with how we feel first. Then, as we come out of this dark time we can hopefully give it meaning. My main goal during the last year has been to remind people that God is always with us. There’s necessary work that we need to be doing right now. No matter what, God is with us.”
Kylie has also gained a fantastic sense of perspective on her work and life. “I do understand that God uses things like this to grow us, but we have to look at it for it to change us. Sometimes, I still can’t understand what has happened. It’s been tough to watch it all. I feel very, very honored that I’ve been part of everyone’s story in some way, the people who have died and the people who have gotten better.”
At LaGrange College, we like to say that our work with students is all about life transformation. We know that the 18-year-old freshman who first walks up “the hill” can become a very different person by the time they are 22 and walk across the commencement stage. I am proud of the people these two young leaders have been forced to become so quickly. Today they sound more like seasoned veterans than rookies, and that’s precisely what they are. In fact, I believe that Kylie and Garrett represent a group of young professionals in LaGrange and around our country who will lead in ways that other generations perhaps could not have done at such a young age. Quite simply, they have become like tempered steel, hardened in the fires of crisis at the very beginning of their careers. As we begin to see the storm clouds of COVID-19 clearing, Garrett and Kylie can see the good that may come of this terrible time.
“The pandemic has revealed things about the world and about what it means to be a pastor that were always there before, but I didn’t pay attention. I’ve had to pay attention to myself and my bad habits more. It’s made me focus on taking care of myself and not just to gloss over things that I need to address,” Garrett says. “It’s revealed what people actually care about in society. It’s shown you where our hearts actually are. There’s been more selfishness and self-righteousness and pride. The people who genuinely love and care for their neighbor, it’s been pretty easy to see if that was true. Some people say it, but when the time came to put it into action, they weren’t willing to make a sacrifice. You have to let go of your ideas of perfection. You have to do the best with what you have and do your best to take care of yourself in the process so that you can help other people.”
Kylie says that her experience has been surreal and that “sometimes I’ll sit in a room with a patient who can’t talk and I’ll think, 'who are you, where do you come from, where are you going,' and I’m amazed to think that I’ve gotten to be a little blip in their story. My biggest takeaway of all is just to cherish people. Cherish your time, your life, and your relationships. The stuff that you hear and see and read about people dying young; it’s real. I’ve had dying people literally look me in the eye and say, ‘nothing else matters but family.’ After they’ve been to hell and back, that’s what they have to say.”
I am so grateful for all the young people like Garrett Wallace and Kylie Taunton Wallace, who are leading us through the fire in LaGrange, Georgia, in our country, and around the world. I was honored to have been their college Chaplain. I was honored to stand with them at the altar as they exchanged vows and married in the fall of 2020. I will be honored to watch all that they do for the building of God’s kingdom and a better world. I think they may very well be part of what becomes our next “greatest generation.”