One Down, Three to Go

I am sitting at my desk in a sunlit dorm room, eating peanut butter out of a can.

It is the only food I have left, and I cannot purchase more because what meager funds remain to me are reserved for the festivities after finals. I am eating with a measuring spoon borrowed from the floor kitchen, my own spoons having been packed away and sent home yesterday. I could make tea, but alas, all of my mugs are gone, too, and I'm not sure I want to put in the effort to wash one more loaned dish when I'm finished. Dinner is in a few minutes; I can wait.

My vision has gone rather blurry from an afternoon spent studying and I am half-inclined to find a place where I can burn all of my notes and forget the exams altogether. I would like to be on the beach, not in this dreary homework stupor, and yet I'm sitting here bouncing my leg and contemplating how high a grade I have to pull off tomorrow to get an A. I never used to bounce my leg.

Such is the life of a college student, and even if it doesn't sound like it, I am happy to be living it. These are surely some of the most fun days I will ever know.

In the thick of studying (or procrastination, whichever you would like to call it), my inspiration is a little lackluster, but since it has been months since I have written to all of you, dear readers, I thought perhaps I would tell you a few of the things I have learned in my freshman year at Moody Bible Institute.

Naps are a good thing. I was at war with this truth for the whole of my childhood. I hated taking naps, hated sleeping in general most of the time, and often completely refused to rest even when I was exhausted. Day two of college, all of that changed. I am now a firm believer that sleep is one of the greatest gifts God has given us and most things are helped, if not cured, by naps.

It is possible to do college without being exhausted and broke all the time. I thought that all college students were poor, stressed, exhausted, and unhealthy one-hundred percent of the time. Turns out, college can be managed without a million allnighters or a constant, steady diet of Ramen Noodles. Good boundaries are incredibly helpful. Rarely have I studied past 10 o'clock at night this year and, until recently, I wasn't feeling much financial strain. Even a college student can lead a healthy adult life with enough sleep, money, nutrition, exercise, etc.

Conflict doesn't have to be scary. I came to Moody believing that disagreements and fights basically always did irreparable damage to relationships, so, often, at the first sign of conflict, I just shut down or run away. This year, though, I have been surrounded by brothers and sisters who are willing to work through things and hold me at a higher value than our conflict. They are teaching me to be confident in confrontation, knowing that at the end of the day, our relationships are not broken beyond repair. I'm getting better at speaking up when I'm hurt, often having conversations that lead to forgiveness even without complete resolution. I've had several interactions that leave conflict open-ended, but love as the foundation, meaning we can always come back to it without fear.

God is faithful. I had no idea how I was gonna pay my way through this year, but here I am, still enroled and even able to go see a movie tomorrow night. God invited me to trust Him again and again as I struggled to see how I would stay at Moody. So many times over, I prayed, "Lord, I have seen you provide for my family--now I need you to provide for me." And suddenly there were generous grandparents and job opportunities and even totaled cars that led to large sums coming from insurance companies. God not only provided for the bare minimum of school bills, but also for food and clothes and fun things. And it wasn't just financial burdens that He carried. I have been sustained physically and emotionally in ways I didn't even think about coming into this place. His faithfulness extends to the heavens.

A teachable spirit goes a long way. Of all the virtues I have seen in the students and professors here at Moody, humility is the most attractive. Those who live open to the fact that they might be wrong and approach others with a posture of selflessness are the ones who make the best students and teachers. I have seen in my own classroom experience how hard it is to learn when I think I already know and how much better my learning becomes when that obstacle is removed. I have also seen how gentleness, even when accompanying rebuke, is effective in building up relationships and healing hurts within the Body of Christ. I have prayed and hoped that I will keep a soft-hearting teachability for my whole life.

If you have made it this far, through all my chunky paragraphs, I commend you. It's dinner time now and I'm headed out to be nourished in body and spirit and perhaps lay claim to a B instead of an A, because that's another thing I'm learning.

Sometimes it's okay to just enjoy the process, without worrying about how high you score.