Senior Year Reflections

I have fewer iPhoto albums from my senior year than I do from any other year of college, and I’m not surprised. As a freshman, everything about college feels fresh and exciting and photo-worthy, but as a senior, everything feels well worn and comfortable—so comfortable, in fact, that everyone resents having to look forward and far away to figure out exactly what to do next. Senior year was, at least for me, a strange juxtaposition of realizing that college was ending just as I was finally starting to get college. This assigned every dinner, every group study session, every birthday party a sense of urgency: enjoy this, enjoy college, because we won’t have it much longer. But “enjoy” is a poor choice of a word, since what we feel is something much more profound than simple happiness or pleasure. “Cherish this,” maybe, or “hold tightly to this.”

My senior year was the first year at ACU where I struck some shadow of a balance between all of my various responsibilities and relationships. Simply put, I experienced fewer commitments but greater commitment. My resume of on-campus involvement over the last four years may be atypical, as it started very full and actually shrank every year. This year, I continued with my family at Southern Hills and led another lifegroup, I worked as the Greek tutor and picked up some hours at a dorm office, I dressed like a Ninja Turtle for Sing Song, I went on a Spring Break Campaign to Seattle, and I ate some delicious meals with friends in the ACU Locavore club. But my shrinking list of commitments also translated socially: as is the case for most students, I spent time with a narrower range of people than in the past as I tried (maybe subconsciously) to invest in my most significant relationships. There were still all-nighters, and I’m sure I dropped the ball in relationships more often than I like to remember, but I rarely experienced the burden of being stretched too thin this year, and for that I am grateful.

I found myself clinging much more tightly to my friends and family this year, and I think it had something to do with that approaching transition out of the familiar into the unknown. Graduating single among some married or soon-to-be-married friends contributed to this yearning for closeness, as I found myself wanting (as I’m sure we all want) to know without a doubt that I was not alone, that someone knew me, that I existed outside of myself because I had impacted another. This affected my perception of church and the concept of church family, and thus I believe it is absolutely essential for followers of Jesus to give and receive the relationships we are promised in the community of God (Mark 10:28-30). The church I eventually seek (whenever I settle down somewhere) will undoubtedly be characterized by close, active family relationships.

If I thought I would have my personal belief system established by the time I was a senior, I gave up on that expectation pretty early into the year. This was the first year when I finally understood in my gut what God means when he says, “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:9). I had to take many different worldviews much more seriously than I had before, and while my most central beliefs remain unchanged, I had to start negotiating with some of my marginal beliefs. If nothing else, I think I gained a bit more humility in my perception of my own ability to get God completely right and to represent him well to the world. My generation generally values humility in the interactions between people of different perspectives, and it’s tough to navigate between what is and isn’t worth fighting over.

One of my beliefs under the knife this year was the role of women in the community of God, a debate that is slowly beginning to rage in many Churches of Christ (see posts: "'Half the Church'" and "Are Women 'Oppressed'?"). As with many different difficult topics, this was a problem I had never felt much pressure to engage, but it finally became a crisis for me in the fall after I attended a few classes at ACU’s Summit. Thankfully, I have good friends and mentors who have been willing to debate or lament with me, and their patience as I stumble towards something like a cohesive worldview has personified the patience of God to me.

In the midst of such questions, the biggest process of my year was researching, applying to, and choosing between graduate schools. Before I could do that, though, I had to craft some sort of career plan for my life (or at least for the next three years), and I’ve thoroughly chronicled that difficult process on this blog (see, for example, this post). In all honesty, my decision about what to do after graduation was one of the most difficult and exhausting decisions I’ve ever had to make, the kind where I picked apart each option so much that eventually I was just tired of all of my choices. Although I did finally settle on a path with which I am very pleased, the entire process was a significant reminder for me that God is not as much concerned with what I will do or will become as he is with forming relationship with me as I am right now. I have too often ignored the present out of an eagerness to be prepared for the future, but the God of the Bible often provides outcomes or solutions we never would have expected. In other words: try as I might to do everything I can to prepare myself to serve God in the world, I think I tend to miss the ways God has actually been subtly forming and directing me for his own purposes.

That being said, this was also a season in my life in which I began to cling very dearly to a personal eschatology, that is, my beliefs about the end times and the culmination of history. Romans 8:18 and the passage that contains it have become one of my most crucial pieces of scripture: “I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.” There have been times when my beliefs about God’s ultimate purposes in the world (and his promises about how those purposes include us) have felt like water for my soul. We absolutely can have hope that, in the end, all of this will have been worth it—the pain and suffering of this life will be like the pains of pregnancy, which are quickly forgotten when the new child arrives with joy (Romans 8:22). And with that knowledge, we can believe that things are getting better, even if we have every reason to doubt.

Finally, in light of that eschatology, I have been struggling for about a year and a half with the question of prudence vs. boldness, both of which the Christian must keep in a delicate balance (see post: "Prudence"). I have felt the restlessness of wanting to act but waiting on God’s timing, and I have often wondered whether my decision to wait and be still demonstrates faithful patience or cowardly apathy. I do not want to sit on the sidelines, but neither do I want to live with a rash anxiety that is out of rhythm with God’s slow and steady activity in the world.

I cannot count how many times this year I had to shake my head and think, “If someone had told me on my first day of freshman year that I would eventually be having this conversation / making this decision / suffering this loss / praying for God to do this, I would not have believed it.” If nothing else, I have learned that my feeble attempts to anticipate God and his activity in the world typically result in me feeling surprised and amazed by what he actually does. This was a year in which both the laughter and the tears—and there were tears—were a reminder that we live in a world in which the light of God is breaking through the darkness of sin and death. It was a very good year.