It's been a while...


Hello everyone,

It’s been a minute since I’ve written. I’ve been settling and then resettling into uni with all its requirements and changes and demands. Getting used to having a heavier workload has been interesting and I’ve had to learn what my new normal looks like. But I’m grateful for the community around me and the people that have been there to support me and even just help get my mind off school when that’s what I’ve desperately needed. In regards to making friends, like many other things in life, it seems to come more naturally when your thoughts aren’t constantly revolving around it.

Today I was thinking about some friends I currently have now who I would never have imagined myself being friends with during our first encounters. I think of the way they annoyed me or misunderstood me or just seemed completely different from the idea I had about what my friends would look like. Time and time again in my journey with making friends in different seasons in my life, I’ve had to learn and relearn being open and not so focused on what I think good friends would look like. It’s one thing to want to share values and core beliefs and it’s a completely different thing to have one specific type of person you think your friends must be or to get to a new school or environment and set your sights on only one group of people. I’ve come to learn that if it was truly up to us and our ‘active’ efforts to find friends, we often overlook those people that we end up being in great relationships with. As the old saying goes (probably front the Bible actually) “do not despise the day of small beginnings”. It’s so easy to want to jump right into the intimacy part, into the sitting together at lunch and walking back from class together and dreaming and laughing and crying. We forget these mountaintop epiphanies and these stable, sturdy friendships are made from individual moments and conversations that can have very scary, bizarre or awkward beginnings.

Personally, whenever I’ve slowed down and really (actually, not just in words) handed over those things I want and desire to God and have chosen to focus on what I know and on Him instead, either I’ve started wanting different things or I’ve found the answers and gotten those things in time. But I have to be open. I have to be willing to leave those things in God’s hands and trust that they will come together. In the meantime, all I can really do is show up and be kind and be open to the people around me. Some of my closest friends today are people that at one point or the other, I had firmly shut my relationship doors on. Some people I’ve also gotten along with great from the onset. The point is, we don’t know nearly as much as we think we do. And the moment we realise that and that that realisation is followed by surrender to the One who does know all these things, I think we find peace and the grace to navigate those difficult waiting seasons.

I’ll probably be scaling back in how much I write cause college really is just like that… but yeah, hope everyone had a great September.

From a Christian college freshman to you.

Dera

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