Dear Will:

My children have the misfortune of being raised by a guy who doesn’t have a clue how to become wealthy. The making money part I can do. It’s the accumulating of money that has always baffled me.

No one is more upset about this fact than my son Luke, who now finds himself just weeks away from high school graduation. Luke is scary-smart, and except for a pathological distaste for math homework, he does very well in school. He also has the good fortune of doing very well on standardized tests. Add to that the fact that he has spent six years at the Orange County High School of the Arts (where he receives 10 hours each week in after-school creative writing classes) and you get the idea that he shouldn’t have too much trouble getting into college.

To validate that theory, Luke applied for admission to Claremont McKenna College, the ultra-prestigious private university about a half hour north of here. How prestigious is it? It’s generally regarded as one of the top 15 liberal arts schools in the country. There are only 1,150 students there—TOTAL—meaning that it admits only around 260 students a year (maybe 10% or 11% of those who apply). Needless to say, if you can get admitted to Claremont McKenna, it’s a big deal.

Well, Luke got in. I don’t know if I have ever seen him more excited. And I couldn’t have been more pleased. That is, before I got the letter from the Financial Aid Office. It will cost roughly $50,000 for Luke to attend CMC, they say, including tuition, living expenses, and incidentals. But not to worry, they told me. They would throw in $9,300 to help us out.

Ninety-three hundred dollars. A generous offer, perhaps, but it still leaves me $40,000+ short. And that’s just in Year One.

Now I don’t know about you, but I don’t have $160,000 set aside to send my kid to the college of his choice. In fact, I don’t have $16,000. I tried pleading my case to the school, but they weren’t about to contribute enough to make it possible. Luke, of course, is devastated; and I feel as though I arrived at one of those critical dad-moments and was completely unprepared.

But not just unprepared. Inadequate. Helpless. Having fallen so far short of the mark, I found myself unable to conceive of a solution to help him out. I want so badly to send him to this great school, but I can’t pull it off. It is not within my power to do so.

In the many hours of soul-searching I have spent over the last few weeks, I have more than once reflected on the incomprehensible miracle of the Atonement of Jesus Christ. In this life, we cannot begin to approach our Heavenly Father’s divine nature. No matter how hard we try, we will be so unholy that we could not dwell in His presence. Christ, in his infinite love for us, makes reconciliation possible, enabling us to overcome that which we could never overcome on our own. It is as if he came along and paid the $160 gazillion for me. Not because I deserve it (perhaps, in fact, because I don’t). It is His free gift to me—to all of us—which he grants in exchange for our best effort to live the gospel and show our faith in him. No amount of hard work and effort will make us worthy of that gift—rather it is through grace that He makes His Atonement available to us.

Perhaps that analogy is a little strained, but it seems very real to me. This painful, disappointing experience has deepened my understanding of and gratitude for that Great Act of Love. And for that I am grateful. It doesn’t help Luke pay for college, but it does help.

PW