Graduation

Well, I've graduated from college. It hit me as I was driving away that I'd never be coming back, and that felt strange. When you live somewhere, that place becomes your frame of reference, your mode of understanding life, your world. And just like that, that world is gone. How can something that for four years was the pattern for your thoughts and the borders of your existence suddenly vanish? But it has. And that's ok.

My mom shared with me once that when I graduated from high school, she worried that I wouldn't experience the same caliber of amazing friendships that I had in high school. But God was faithful, and I found a group of people in college who became my spiritual and emotional family, with relationships every bit as vibrant as those of high school.

As I move on  to the next phase of life, its tempting to despair that I will be left lonely and unfulfilled. I'm leaving the place where I cried and laughed and thought and loved. And although I will keep my high school and college friends who have filled my life with color and adventure, we may not always be geographically near each other. I know it will be a struggle to form a new home in Asia, Law School, and beyond. I can easily become afraid that I may end up feeling lost and homesick. When I start to think these thoughts, I am chided by Truth, who gently reminds me that I did basically nothing to form my friendships or my home in the first place. But really. I kind of awkwardly followed people around and then somehow we became friends. The people I would have chosen to be my friends never became so, but the friendships I did form were so much more worthwhile than the ones I originally desired. I didn't know when I chose to attend Spring Arbor how it would grow me in ways I could never imagine, but somehow I chose it anyway. I can only conclude that God steered my friendships and my life toward what he knew I would need, and I have no reason to believe that he'll abandon me to my own devices next time around.

I'm leaving college, but God has promised me hope, a future, and eternal pleasures in his presence. My friends and family will not always be near, but God was faithful in providing them to me in the first place, and he will provide again. I'm leaving college, my world for the last four years, and its strange, but its ok.