If there is one thing I am thankful for the most as I reflect back on the past year, and look forward to the year ahead of me on the cusp of my 20th birthday, it is the fact that things change. And that is saying a lot considering I feel like I am going through some pretty painful changes right now. The last year has been filled with some of the worst and most lonely days I have ever faced, but has also brought some of the most beautiful days and valuable friendships I could ever ask for.
There is something painfully ironic about the duality of life. The way the sun feels brighter after the rain comes. The way the flowers grow brighter and bigger, and the earth comes alive again when the sun returns. But as it rains, there is pain, there is hurting, and unimaginable guilt and dread. This past year I have lost people I thought would be in my life forever, coped with chronic illness that fights every day to take my joy, nearly lost my job because of a faceless allegation I wasn’t pleasant enough. Every stronghold I put up, everything I trusted to be there when I needed it the most was gone in the face of a suicide rocking my best friend’s family. My intense loneliness couldn’t be fixed by the people who promised they would be there, but who conveniently disappeared when they realized that being there for me then meant sticking my issues out forever.
And I sit here, with a hurting, yet somehow thankful heart because God never left me once. He has provided for me through it all, even when I didn’t think there was any way I could keep going. He put the people in my life I needed, enough to support me, but not enough to let me forget there was no way I could make it through without him. In the wreckage of my broken heart and broken dreams I still have a family who loves me and is there for me, a roommate who somehow isn’t annoyed by the absolute disaster everyone else sees me as, and people in my church family who go out of their way to take care of me. And I’m in the program I dreamed of being in, pursuing my goal of helping people just the way I have wanted to since I was 14. How can I look at all of that and not be thankful?
Things change, things will always be changing. And the further I go the further behind me things become. The more I have the opportunity to grow, and heal, and change. I am what is always changing. And no matter what other people think of me, there will always be a God who loves me and is working all things together for my good. And more than ever, since coming to college I have learned to rest on this truth, and I pray you are too.
journal of a dreamer. 