Now I’m in College…

College life is… different.

Now that I’ve stated the obvious, I’ll get into specifics. There is a sense of freedom here in this tiny college town that no lack of curfew in high school can match. I live in an apartment with a fantastic raised-Christian roommate who is now my best friend. We go through everything together, which is comforting in an already-turbulent social scene. As the end of our second semester approaches, I find it hard to believe how much we’ve already been through and how much we’ve grown up over the last nine months.

Last summer, I thought I was going to transition into Super Christian mode. I had a big stack of tracts ready to go, my roommate and I were getting to know each other and making plans to find a new church and join the BSM, and I was gearing up for a spotless lifestyle. But all of that never happened… I think God had other plans for me and my roommate.

We are in an Honors College, a sect of a university that lives together and shares the burden of a heavier work load and high ambitions. We’re like a big family. The group of friends we immediately settled into were all sophomores, already well into the swing of college life and eager to take us under their wings above all the other freshmen. Several are Christian, but none are exactly the church-going, praise-song-singing kinds of people I imagined I’d like to be. But these were an awesome group of people! They were (mostly) responsible and knew how to have fun without being too stupid about it. As my roommate and I built friendships, school involvement also heightened. I joined the school’s Ipmrov Troupe, excited for the opportunity to be quick-witted on stage. Rehearsals just so happen to be at the same time as the BSM meetings. I wasn’t as involved in the purely Christian scene as I had hoped I’d be, but I was making connections.

The downer was that, a few months earlier, several of our close friends had been REALL stupid and committed a pretty big theft. Two of our closest friends were arrested just a month into the first semester, and several others were punished in other ways… The social utopia began to crumble. We had associated ourselves with thieves unknowingly, and were then caught in the middle of a huge storm.

But we didn’t abandon our friends. When explaining my situation to my parents, who understandably thought I was in the wrong crowd, I reminded them that Jesus hung out with prostitutes and tax collectors. My apartment became a sort of sanctuary where our struggling friends could come to feel safe. My roommate and I brewed countless pots of coffee. We prayed with them and talked with them, and our friends confided in us and developed a huge amount of respect for us. To this day, all of the sophomores we connected with still consider us the glue that kept the group from crumbling away completely. Seeing our loving example has even strengthened some of their faiths.

Even though our first semesters in college have been less than ideal and I’m not living the life I imagined I would, I really feel that I’m in the right place with the right people. God has purposes for all of us, and my roommate and I feel that we didn’t make a mistake by getting in on a social circle that wasn’t necessarily pure and Godly in every way. I doubt such a group even really exists in college… We just have to make the best of what we’re given, live lovingly with our neighbors, try not to judge others for their faults, and lead by good Christlike example every day. I couldn’t have learned that lesson if I had sheltered myself from the reality of college life.

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