These are the days that I might be missing soon.

Things I am thinking about with regards to the upcoming change in life:

Okay, so I won’t miss finals. I won’t miss tedious homework. I won’t even miss paying tuition or other such costs.

Yet…

I actually will miss sitting in classes that were a sporadically proper mix between dull and wonderful.

I will miss sunny days in which the value of free time is intensified by the fact that I have to go study for finals. 

I will miss lying idly in the grass in the sunshine for awhile until someone I know appears and decides to sit and chat for however long they please. 

I will miss the nights of heading out to seven eleven randomly at midnight because we are in college and get hungry.

I will miss the ease of availability of wisdom from and relationships with professors.

Among other important things, I suppose in general I will miss the context in which my relationships exist now. This context will soon change quite drastically for the first time in 16 years of education…

You might say I am getting somewhat nostalgic. I ought to be outlining for my ethics final, but I really couldn’t commit at the moment. I needed to think about a few things.

I was talking to friends today and I realized that I am feeling just about every emotion possible about graduation. I feel sad to be leaving, happy to be done, wistful that it has to end, pleased to be moving on, it keeps going. There is a sense of loss that I am experiencing. It hurts a bit, knowing that some things end and you don’t get them back. That life moves on and you don’t get to keep living in the wonderful context you have loved.

But there’s also good things. Life is good because the source of life is good (God). There are things that are worth doing that will bring personal satisfaction after college. In fact, those things might even be better than college. I wonder if in some ways we have created an artificial experience here. School is 16 years if you go to university. Life is about…80 years or so. That means that at this point I have 60 years of life to live left. That is more life than I have ever thought about living. There quite honestly must be more than college.

Honestly, I have loved college. It has been great. So many good memories, so many useful lessons, so much learned, so much experienced, so much development. Yet, every step that I have taken in life till this point has resulted in life that is fuller –at times more complicated perhaps–but fuller and more worthwhile nonetheless. Walking through each new door and leaving behind a great experience while taking relationships and what you’ve learned with you, inevitably finds something new. You are different, the world is different as a result, and somehow it is better.

My friend Johanna quoted John Mayer to me in high school saying that “the best of me is still hiding up my sleeve.” I think that ought to be what we graduates should be looking for. Not necessarily the recreation of the college experience, but perhaps more of the full-participation in God’s plan for us as a result of our college experience. The real us is negotiated every single day. Each day we grow, we learn, we hurt, we eat food, etc…But each day we are in a process of becoming. You weren’t the person you were yesterday, neither am I. Something is different. Maybe it’s just today, but somehow I think it has more to do with us. 

Maybe the point of what I’m trying to say is that somehow I’ve got to learn to put this lovely, wonderful, dear to my heart, and all-too-short experience in the context of a life that is 80 years long (God willing). It has been the culmination of my studies thus far to graduate college with a degree, but the culmination of my studies doesn’t necessarily translate into the culmination of life as it is meant to be. We can’t stay in college forever, and so as graduation looms it would seem that I have to learn to see value and life in terms of a new context. Rather than ask, what the post-college context looks like, I wonder if I have even been asking the right questions or thinking about the right things.

I have been asking “what will change? and how do I adjust to that?” I think that maybe I should be thinking in terms of “God never changes. I do. How do I walk with Him through this?” Honestly, the scariest thing may be the uncertainty of the rest of life that comes at this point. Still, I don’t know that the rest of life is necessarily where my focus needs to be. Nor on the size of the change that I face. Just maybe the focus that I need to have is on the immediacy of the eternal God in this moment, and in all future moments like this one. In every step that I take, I move towards something that God has prepared for me. “The LORD Himself goes before you and He will be with you, He will never leave you nor forsake you. Do not be afraid, do not be discouraged.” Deuteronomy 31:8 could be that verse that we could all hear. Especially me and the other graduate sorts.

Real life in T-minus 11 days and counting. For those of you who I say goodbye to and never see again in a week from Sunday, goodbye in the Kingdom of God is a bit of a silly thing to begin with. There’s this thing that they say in the movie He-Man. They say “Good journey.” It’s interesting how accurate that is to our experience as Christians. We are on a journey with the sovereign God to an unknown land that He will show us. God invited and guided us onto the path, is with us on the way, and He will meet us all at the end. If I don’t see you again in life after graduation, it is there that I hope to see you. It is there that all will be as it was meant to be. It is there that we will see that goodbye was always a shortsighted phrase and that perhaps we were never as far from each other as we thought. On that day, you save me a high five. They never get old.