I hated most of college. After a year of school, I was really discouraged and had no idea what I wanted to study. I wanted to take a semester off, but wasn’t sure my parents would support that, and was terrified that their fears that I would end up as a homeless person unable to support myself would surely come to fruition if I stepped off of the normal course and didn’t go to school for a bit. (Ok, those fears weren’t COMPLETELY voiced by them, but MOSTLY. They were scared.)
After failing class during my second semester of college and realizing my parents disappointment, I wandered in to my pastor’s office. I went because I wanted to schedule some time to talk with him, and as he asked me what I wanted to talk about, I broke down. I cried HARD and that is saying something. He motioned for me to come in, and told me he had time to talk with me right then. I poured out my heart, telling him how I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up, how there was so much pressure for me to MAKE IT, and I just was so unmotivated to prove that I could make it. He told me that the best thing he did during his college years was to take a year off, and he encouraged me to just go for it. He assured me of God’s care for me, and encouraged me to begin keeping “Ebenezers” to remind me of God’s faithfulness.
Guess what? I have now have an Ebenezer Jar of stones that I write on with a sharpie marker (word and date), and I have a few other tokens of remembrance, but I so often forget to go back and tell the stories. But I did tonight. I picked up the a stone dated 11/3/12, and I remembered how I came to St. Louis, and what a good (in the truest sense of the word) thing it was for me to be in seminary classes for a year. In November of 2012, life was not easy. It’s not easy now. Gracious, does it ever get easy? But God is present, and he is good, and he is faithful.
Bits from KK 