The Final Chorus of Dears
Dear Senioritis,
You are the virus with no cure and you will undoubtedly be the disease that destroys my G.P.A. You should really stop hanging out with Apathy, because together you always convince me to take a ride to the Procrastination Station. They don’t hand out diplomas there.
Dear Self,
Put the guitar riffs of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” on repeat and bump up the volume so loud Canada can sing along.
Because when you stop believing that prayer changes things and that God transforms the most unlikely people, remember that you can’t afford to forget that
He still does the impossible.
Don’t stop believing
in summer nights, bonfires, & endless stars.
in pea coats, iced coffee, & books.
in art, the weight of words, & brokenness.
in honesty, vulnerability, & doing things on purpose.
in mistakes, apologies, & grace.
in a lifetime of moments, not minutes.
in the dysfunctional, supportive, & family.
in friends, promises, & chocolate.
in redemption, Jesus, & unconditional love
I wish my mind would stop chasing after you. But you are those annoying trick candles that never seem to burn out. As soon as I think I’m over you, you pop up again, and each time you are brighter than before.
This distance has not made my heart grow fonder.
Instead, it has just created empty, silent space in which my aimless imagination wanders.
And the plane ride you caught back here brought me back to myself, back to my senses, gave me a new perspective with sharper lenses to see each idol I had worshipped.
You were my god and my soul was your servant.
So now, I’m confessing and repenting and forgiving and learning
That I need to stop blaming you. Because, really, how can a girl fairly hold a boy responsible for breaking her heart when he had no idea he was holding it in the first place?
The only person I can blame is myself,
For giving you something you weren’t ready to hold,
Something you were never meant to hold.
I need to stop giving my heart away and wait for a boy who actually earns the right to ask for it.
Dear Heart,
You're not the smartest muscle in me, but you sure are the one that pounds the loudest and tugs the strongest when the rest of my rational intellect has tried to suppress everything that you keep pumping to the surface.
You may be the quietest voice, but you are always the most convincing.
If you existed outside of the prison cage of my ribs, you would be a scandalously dressed emotional harlot looking for love on the corner of artificial attraction.
I should really learn how to protect you more.
I should really learn how to clothe you with Christ.
I am praying that you will be found by the God you aren’t looking for.
You told me once that you stopped believing in Christ when being taborific became more important than being transformed.
And you stopped believing when
your name became a number,
your person became a project,
and getting saved made you a statistic.
Fair enough, I replied. It’s all I could think of to say.
I wouldn’t want to go to church either if the self-righteous said there wasn’t enough room for my sins on the Sunday pew.
As if the virtuous are somehow religiously above having vices too
Dear Fellow Hypocritical Christians,
I wish our ignorance wasn’t so good at convincing our minute minds that being a Christian is some kind of box you check on Facebook.
And I wish our arrogance didn’t convince our attitudes that the race Paul was talking about in 1 Corinthians 9 was some kind of morality contest.
Because if we’re all good at being good, well then, we should have let God know not to send Jesus because salvation was something we could have taken care of ourselves.
I’ve read in the Bible where Jesus says to walk with Him. Next time I meet a Christian, I’m going to ask to see the bottom of his soles.
Dear Tabor College,
I will be forever indebted to you. Both figuratively and financially.
I will have never ending student loans but now, because of you, I’ve got never ending love for Christ and his people.
Weird how the last place I wanted to go is the very place I needed to be.
Weird how the reason why I came isn’t the reason why I stayed.
It’s been a great ride and I’m going to miss you when my future hunts me down in May.
But what if I reveled in the fact that I’ve got stories here
About bravery that are book ended by sweet memories.
A library filled with novels of late nights, pages of good decisions, and words incomprehensible due to teardrops created by bad decisions but nonetheless beautifully decorate chapters of change and always give way to lines of laughter,
My story may have paragraphs of pain, but it’s been redeemed by a prologue of prayer that will lead me to an epilogue of enjoyment I call life.
Thank you, Tabor College, for loving me in and through my growing pains.
COPYRIGHT -- SARAH WYCKOFF
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