Morgan Kendrick serves as Campus Staff at Vanderbilt University. This article was originally published at ByFaith Magazine and you can read the full text here.
I longed to be a “grown-up.” For many, college is the gateway to adulthood. It serves as the launching point into independence and offers the opportunity to write your own story.
I applied to schools that fit my grown-up agenda. I wanted to attend a college with a low acceptance rate and bask in the prestige that came with it. I wanted social scenes that would have the right vibes and lead me to the people who could advance my career aspirations.
When I received the admittance letter to my number one pick, I cried. They wanted me just as much as I wanted them. This was my shot.
Freshmen settling into dorms might find themselves in the same situation. Everything seems new, exciting, and unknown. It’s syllabus week, and your classes sound more interesting than you could have dared imagine. Campus is overwhelming, but exciting.
But with the excitement also comes anxiety. The unknowns can feel as scary as they do intriguing. There are too many names and faces to remember, and you are already longing for your friends from home.
New beginnings require a kind of death. You have to part ways with your old life as you seek to establish a new one.
Wherever you find yourself, remember this: God is always at work in unlikely places.
I was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed heading into my new beginning in the fall of 2014. I met my roommate for the very first time on move-in day. We shook hands in the morning and then slept in the same room, 10 feet from each other, that night. My dorm was decorated with some familiar favorites from my childhood bedroom and some new digs from Marshalls, though my new setup lacked the familiarity of home.
The dining hall food started to get old by the second week. I sat in classes with strangers, walked on campus with strangers, and felt much like a stranger myself. The intrigue I had for adulthood was being suffocated by my reality. Starting something new is hard.
Over the course of my freshman year, I realized more and more that change involves loss, no matter how good that change is. I grieved my loss of proximity to friends back home, the ease of high school academics, and the accountability of living with my family. With my independence came an exponential increase in responsibility, my loneliness increasingly exacerbated by memories of family friends saying things like, “The college years are the best years of your life!”
Was there something wrong with me? Everything being new was supposed to feel like freedom, but now it felt alien. I was looking around at my classmates and asking, “Are we all feeling this way?” Through my years in college and working in campus ministry, I’ve discovered that the answer is yes, we are.
I spent much of my freshman year weighed down by loneliness and grief, but at a certain point, desperation led me through the doors of a small ministry I had noticed at the student organization fair. It was called Reformed University Fellowship. I was not a Christian, but I was hungry for friendship and answers to all the questions that were swimming around in my head.