Welcome back to this year’s summer series! If you missed the last post, I am taking a different route, and introducing a more personal tone to the blog. I will be spending this summer sharing what life has been like for me, what I have in store for my future, and how God has been working through it all. In the first post of the series, I introduced my job at a summer camp, and shared both my excitements and my fears for weeks ahead. This week, I am going to backtrack a bit and share about my high school graduation.
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Waking up on the day of my graduation, it felt like Christmas: you wait for the day for so long, and when it finally comes, you are shocked at how much it feels like just another day. In fact, I spent the whole morning laying on the ground with cramps (told you it would be more personal). Going through my day was uneventful, and I just laid around while I waited for the time I had to get ready to go. I am a very emotional person, and I pictured myself getting ready for this day a million times, all of them including me crying, so I was shocked at how unaffected I felt. Even though it was the end of a thirteen-year journey, all I cared about was getting the ceremony over with so that I could go eat dinner with my family. All of a sudden, the cords and medals I spent so long working towards was the least of my concerns.
It wasn’t until a few weeks later when I really sat with the gravity of my accomplishment. Although the graduation ceremony itself only involved me walking across a football field to be handed a diploma, the process to get there was so much more than that.
My entire life, I have been a natural student. I love to learn and to push myself, which always suited me very well in the classroom. I was blessed to have been a part of gifted classes from kindergarten, and was always pushed by teachers that saw my potential before I did. Because of this, school was a breeze all throughout elementary and middle school.
As most of you know, though, high school is a whole different ball game. Classes become harder, and we are told to take an unreasonable workload in order to get college credit and not have student debt throughout our lives. On top of an almost impossible scholastic routine, I had to deal with relationships, extracurriculars that I was told were the key to being successful, and my spiritual life. I remember how hard the struggle was, staying up way too late to figure out a calculus problem or sitting in the bathroom between classes to pray for the strength that I knew I needed for the day. Even though I have so many fond memories from the last four years of my life, I have not been quick to forget the mistakes I made, and the nights where I felt far from at peace and joyful. Certain classes pushed me to my limit, failed relationships and faded friendships caused me to question my worth, and my success became tied to my performance in academics and sports. Thankfully, the Lord held my hand through all of it, and I was able to leave high school confident in my identity, content with my friendships, and disciplined to work hard with what He has given me.
Looking back at my personal statistics, I can see that God has given me blessing upon blessing. I received the highest score on an AP test after essentially teaching myself calculus, made varsity in my second year of ever playing tennis, and learned what it means to really be a born-again Bible believer. None of this was from my own strength: I had many sleepless nights, lots of complaints, and countless times where I wanted to give up. However, God was so good that He gave me strength when I had none, held my tongue when I couldn’t, and loved me when I didn’t feel loved.
To many people, I performed well in academics and sports, and was friendly with almost anyone. However, people don’t understand that this was not my doing, but the Lord’s. Hallelujah!
If I had any regrets, it was that I was too practical. I skipped out on many opportunities with friends because I had a list of things to do, and often didn’t allow myself any time to be with the people I love if I had errands to run or homework to do. I allowed little details to get in the way of building friendships, and I feel like that has definitely affected current relationships with the people around me.
However, one thing that I am proud of is that I learned that it doesn’t matter what other people think of you. Once I understood that most people that you think are staring at you aren’t staring, I saw that I was free to be myself without judgment. Even then, I found out that those who judge me don’t know me or my story, so they can’t understand what I’m going through or how the Lord is silently working on me. Because of this, I became the girl that was first on the dance floor, was constantly dancing around, and made jokes that only I thought were funny. I know many people in my life that don’t do what they want or act like themselves because they are afraid of judgment, and I am grateful that God taught me that lesson and showed me that the only one I am trying to please is the One that made me and deeply knows me.
After reflecting on my high school experience as a whole, I am able to see how God used those years to shape my future. Not only did I figure out my future career, but I found friends, hobbies, and learned so much about myself and those around me. The Lord used both the mundane days and the extraordinary ones to teach me His character, and tested me in order to try me in the fire and refine me.
Although my graduation day was uneventful, the years leading up to it shaped who I am, and have prepared me for where the Lord has me now and will have me in the future.
To those of you who haven’t graduated yet, just remember that it is what you make of it. If you choose to do the bare minimum and fly under the radar, you’ll do just that. However, if you choose to do the hard things, and take the road less traveled by, you’ll find that you made new friends, deepened your relationship with God, and learned so much more about yourself. In fact, this is something that we can all take something from.
No matter what season of life you are in, whether you graduated years ago or are years away from receiving your cap and gown, I hope my quick story was a testimony of God’s goodness through the toughest, yet most rewarding, years of my life.
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Thank you again for reading! Your support is so important to me, and knowing that you want to invest in me and my spiritual life is what keeps me going, even when life gets crazy. <3
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