I usually wait to write up a new blog until I have something profound to say, but all that's on my mind is SUMMER! I can't wait to spend my days with my favorite boy doing ridiculous things like watching The Legend of Korra (new Airbender series!!) and catching up on as many movies as possible. I want to go to the park, feed the ducks, read for pleasure, swim, and wear a messy bun every day!
On the other side of my summer anticipation is the utter shock that I have been in college for a whole year already, that I will be 20 this fall, and that, despite my feelings of inadequacy, I'm kind of a grown up. I don't even know how this happened. Wasn't it yesterday that I was a little girl in a plaid skirt jumping rope with my girlfriends? Wasn't it last week that I was laying in my purple room on Albany Drive, soaking up the air conditioner because it was a hundred degrees outside in the El Paso heat? Sometimes, it's as if none of it ever really happened. That place, those people, it was all a lifetime ago. Even high school seems like something so far away. Yet the memory of it is so strong.
It's a curious thing to know that in only a short while, this time in my life will feel that way, too. Today will be a distant memory, and I will be left wondering if it was ever real at all. But regardless of that feeling, that sense of wonder, I will know. I will know that I was here, just as I know that I was there, too. I know because I am a product of it. That is not to say that my surroundings made me who I am, but without that place and those people, and this place and these people, I could not be who I am.
Everyday I am closer to who I should be. Everyday I get clearer glimpses of who I need to be. There have been tremendous changes since I began my journey at Dallas Baptist. My passions have grown, yet narrowed. I have discovered my love for sociology and clean water and the pure Gospel. I have a deeper understanding of God's grace and my need for it, I have seen my completeness in Christ, and the way in which I see the world has changed.
So this summer is more than sunshine and sand. It is an opportunity to take what I have learned over the past year, and to grow, to blossom into something new, something beautiful.
