In retrospect, there’s no other way to say it than it was one heck of a year! There’s a first time for everything, and though I thought I’d pushed myself to the limit before, I don’t think any other time in my life than this past year is more worthy of that distinctive description. Beyond the classes, the hospital volunteering, organ playing, extracurriculars, writing, and so forth, I think I have reason enough to say the experiences I had junior year in college made for an exemplary advancement in maturity. I’ve never been as challenged intellectually and emotionally as I was in these recent months.

The intellectual stimulation outside of the classroom, led me to certain encounters, which might be described as disheartening and harsh because it’s hard to understand how some people’s opinions can be so close-minded in a world of easily accessible information. Relationships with friends and peers morphed in such a way as to reveal to me that very enlightening truth, that sometimes irreconcilable differences exist between people; that the individual, once set in his or her ways is hard to budge from their interpretation of “what matters in life,” of what’s important to them. Try as you might to get them to see otherwise, the individual is simply that, an individual, and self-interests often come first.

These might seem to be abstract and non-relevant examples for the point I am trying to get across. But what I am aiming for are the ideas, not the actual events. In short, I swallowed my share of bittersweet truths, more than ever before in my life. I could look back on my junior year and think of all these “tainting” experiences, these encounters with the cold world. But as I drove home, with my car brimming with dorm room luggage, I could not help but think of the other luggage that was coming home with me this time around, at the end of another school year: wisdom. I’m by no means wise like those sage people of society we all look up to for guidance and advice. But I am stronger, and wiser in some respects. I experienced growing pains. They hurt for sure, but I survived them, and I did so while repeating what my Auntie Dorothy always told me to say, “I can do all things in Christ who strengthens me.”