From Freshman Hall to Midlife: 31 years later…
It's been 31 years since I turned my tassel, packed up my Subaru, and hugged my roommates goodbye. The future ahead was blank. There was nothing to hang my imagination on, no job secured, no friends down the hall. Strange. All of us, Cheryl, Cindy, Kris, Michelle, and Tony, blown into adulthood, separate directions, never to share a bathroom again.
Recently, a text thread went out between us. "We need to figure out a reunion, ladies! What do you guys think? Can we make this work??" An entire lifetime has passed since some of us have seen each other!
After a year of going back and forth, dropping off, and circling back, we finally made it happen this past April. What a surreal moment. All of us together at my parents' beach house in OCNJ, where we had taken a few trips together in college.
"This is so strange, I sat in this room with all of you and since then, got married, birthed children, and launched them into adulthood. Here we are after living an entire lifetime." (Not my words unless I had children and forget 🤔)...
My memory is like a sack with holes. Useless. It used to scare me, but now I just ask everyone else what happened in my life. It was a team effort, for sure. Each of us offered a few details to the stories.
"That's when we went to Florida on Spring Break. Remember, we drove straight to the Keys in 24-hours! Dawn, didn't you get a speeding ticket in North Carolina?"
"Yep."
"How about us sneaking those 5 kittens into the apartment? Where did we get them anyway? Who took a kitten home after graduation?"
"Wait, who did I share a room with senior year?"
"Cheryl and I went to Camp Hill Mall and got our second ear piercing freshman year! We thought we were being so rebellious!"
Bit by bit, we put the puzzle together; we helped one another make more sense of our lives after a few hours, a few glasses of wine, and lots of laughing. You can imagine we talked for hours. no more chips and salsa; hummus and cucumbers, done; cheese and fruit, just scraps...There were tears, too. Sharing formative years means you share parts of yourself for the rest of your life. We have part ownership over each other's stories. I had no idea that weekend would fill me up the way it did.
We have an accordion file folder stuffed full of conversations we want to have with kids regarding college. I felt it as a teacher of seniors. But what if the advice is less about the major, future job, and networking strategies? What if our words looked more like this...
““It doesn’t actually matter where you go. What matters is who you regularly overlap with in that first year. It matters who you end up talking with at the library till it closes. It matters who you can be vulnerable with, and who can be vulnerable with you. It matters that you learn to see people and invite them to see you. And it matters most that you keep an ongoing, rugged, and honest companionship with Jesus. He won’t make life easy or free from trouble, but he will stitch wisdom into your blood and bones, and this wisdom will help you cultivate a desire for hardy, real relationships. And let’s be honest, emotionally and spiritually mature relationships are bread and butter. Few, very few, have them.””
On Saturday night, we went the The Deauville Inn, a favorite spot on the bay where herring gulls delight with their faint calls in the distance. It sounds like the beach. Old wooden walls, warm and cozy on a chilly night, a seafarer's spot. Still surreal to be together again, Cindy posed a question, "We can answer this when we get home, but think about it: We have lived 30 years since we have seen each other. What does your life look like that you expected it would look like, and what about your life looks totally different from what you imagined it would be?"
What a question. More than anything, I was reminded that we are living stories. Fluid like waves, unpredictable like storm patterns, and glorious with courage like the bird migration. The paragraphs, pages, and chapters are unknown. As much as we think we can control the path, we are at the mercy of a larger narrative. And that narrative is bound together, bit by bit, with mercy.
We sat in the room together with our pile of failures, unmet longings, and disappointments. We smiled at each other's celebrations, embarrassing moments, and tales of overcoming. Somewhere along the way, we have to shed our false selves. The rough road of life took us over bumps that helped us jettison the burdensome belief that life is about "doing everything right," "checking all the moral boxes," and "making Jesus proud."
We all need to jettison the false gospels we adopt. What a warning to us to pay attention to how easily we drift from the life of Jesus.
Most of us begin with a gospel of works (“If I do this, and God will predictably do this...”) and we end in a messy mess.
Eugene Peterson’s words clean off my splotchy lens:
“So the question is not primarily ‘What do I do?’ but rather, ‘What has the Holy Spirit been doing in me all these years of my noncooperation and what is He doing still?’...What is essential is to know that the Christian life is mostly about what is being done to you, not what you are doing”
“What is being done to me…"
Grace and mercy drive everything Jesus does. Revisit the Gospel of John and watch him, listen to his words. For so long, in my early years, I believed there was a “right way” to live. That I could control my behavior and as a result, “God would be pleased.”
[It’s worth sitting with that toxic phrase until it falls apart]
What comes out of that belief? Self-righteousness or utter despair. Those are the only two options. With confidence I told a client, again, today: “Jesus is not about you being perfect, he is about you being dependent. The goal is not that you manage your behavior so well that you no longer need Him.
It was refreshing to be with these ladies who have had to shed the false self, by degrees, over the years. Friendships in midlife with people who are still pretending are exhausting. I can’t do it any more. Another mercy of God. 🙂
What a weekend. To rewind the VHS on all those years of my life was strange, but orienting. We were with each other when we parachuted over the cliff into adulthood. We had no idea what was ahead. We couldn’t have imagined our failures, nor predict the confusing packaging in which our blessings would come. But equally, we had no idea how deep and wide the love of God actually is. But this weekend, we got to look back over the long view—all the grab-bag stuff of our past and present.
My takeaway: there is one story, the story of grace.