PS writing is like squeezing blood from a stone, any help? Forum

[Anonymous User]

I've spent several months struggling to write a personal statement. I've rejected several, and I'm now reaching out to see if anyone can offer guidance on my most recent attempt. At this stage, I'm unconcerned with grammar/spelling. Any comments you have are welcome. I recognize the possible challenge of using theological language in a personal statement, but with my Master's of Divinity, I feel I have to include how my experience in that program has pushed me to go to law school. Thanks.

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Most students in elementary school got in trouble for pulling hair, talking back, or arriving late. I got in trouble for reading. Each time my attention waned while the teacher talked, I surreptitiously slid my book out from my desk. In mere seconds, I traveled from that classroom to the story within the pages. Once caught reading during a lecture, I would inevitably find myself in trouble for having not paid attention. My depth of absorption while reading became so intense that I could tune out all external noise and focus only on the words before me. Teachers had to call my name multiple times to bring me back from inside the book to the classroom.
Words satisfied me in this way for several years. I read my way through the school library and begged my parents to purchase books at local bookstores. In late high school, my appreciation for words began to expand beyond entertainment for entertainment’s sake. When my high school’s rogue English teacher had me read Hume, Spinoza, and Descartes, I marveled at how their words created a structure of ideas. Words gave me access to the competition of worldviews. With words, I could wrap the ideas of great thinkers around me and try to understand what they believed. In my Alabama hometown, this helped me connect with the few Hindus, Atheists, and Jews who attended my largely Christian high school. Having a sense of humility about disagreement with respect to fundamental ideas protected me from discounting their experiences and beliefs outright.
In college, I became somewhat of an evangelist for words. When I volunteered for four years as a soccer coach during my undergraduate studies, I learned that my players (all children with low socio-economic status) probably would face a much larger challenge in standardized testing than their high socio-economic status counterparts. Angry at the unfairness, I began to incorporate new vocabulary and more complex sentence structure into instructions to the players to attempt to offset somewhat the lack of support their schools offered. When they did not understand a new word they would all stop and reason out the definition using context clues. By the end of my time as their coach, onlookers would often hear my players warn each other of opposing players by yelling, “be cognizant of the guy behind you!”
In my master’s studies, words offered body to wispy questions I had not yet approached with rigor. These questions developed into an interest in philosophical theology, existential metaphysics, and ethics. Not only were these subjects interesting, but the questioning involved in approaching them offered to me existential meaning. Questioning blossomed into a self-propagating endeavor, spawning further inquiries and sharpening existing stances. I found it rewarding to frame a question, research it, develop my own position, and, finally, craft a paper to communicate that position.
During my final winter term in my Master’s of Divinity program, I signed up for a travel seminar to the Arizona/Mexico Border. I determined to ask the following question to all stakeholders in immigration along that border: where do you see God in this experience? I hoped to frame migrant understandings of a deity as a syncretic invention from the collision of Aztec migration stories with Catholic imagery. The course instructor took us to Streamline Court, hiked us in the desert migrants crossed, introduced us to Border Patrol Agents, and connected us to non-profit directors, and I asked my question to each person I came encountered.
I stopped asking that question when I arrived at a shelter for deported migrants. At that shelter, after walking around the facility, I found myself alone in a men’s dormitory with two figures covered in blankets. Two sets of brown eyes peeked out from under the blankets, then a nose, and finally a tired, soft, grin. The three of us exchanged greetings, and I asked how they were doing. "More or less fine," they replied. Border Patrol had caught them trying to cross from Mexico into the United States; one of them, a diabetic, had trudged through the desert for fourteen days. The other had a bag of brown fluid attached to an open wound in his stomach, a side effect of cancer, he told me. They "only" had blisters covering their entire feet, sunburn, swollen joints, and dehydration. Both attempted to cross to reunite with their families and support them financially, neither of which were possible for them while in Mexico.
I felt vertigo when the reality of the chasm separating their worlds and mine sunk in. They lay there battered from desert elements and the dehumanizing experience of deportation, far from their families; I stood in their only safe haven with hiking boots, health insurance, a USA passport, and the security of my own family living in the same country as myself. My research question of "Where do you see God in this," suddenly felt inappropriate, even violent. Words failed me. My questions could not help them, at least not in an immediate way.
Words have opened my eyes to new worlds, connected me with people who do not look or live like me, and helped me grapple existentially with rigorous philosophical and theological questions, which have sharpened my concern for others. All of this together without the force of the law, however, fails to help people in the way I would find most and rewarding: to directly change the lives of others in a positive and legal way. With my love of words, lived out in the rigorous work of reading and writing, I wish to pursue admission to <law school>, and subsequently the bar, in order to add teeth to my values.