Last spring, I had a conversation with my good friend Tom Unger about building community and making friends, one that took me several months to process. I was talking with him about how to make friends, and he said that, since he left Nebraska Wesleyan, most of the people who he really considered good friends were the people he knew in high school and in college, and that he found it harder after leaving school because the people you met then, you don’t spend a lot of time with them unless you worked with them. Tom’s words really rung true for me, and took me on a long journey back to my college days, a time that started with high expectations and ended with disappointment.
I went into college thought to myself, yes, this is the place where I will finally free myself from my over-bearing parents and the trapping small town I grew up in. Out of a bad moment, I spent a year at Concordia-St. Paul, feeling ostracized for my conservative, not-embracing contemporary worship position. Left there after a year, kept in touch with no one. Transferred to Concordia Wisconsin, had a group of friends for a while, then we had a falling out middle of my senior year, and I left distraught and embarrassed. Toward the end of my time there, I actually reveled in the fact that I was a loner and better than everyone else, but after I left and was truly alone, I realized that I’d lost a great opportunity, and began replacing it with things that didn’t matter, like video games, sport radio, and shopping, all the while listening to voices in my head that told me everything was fine.
What this really kept me from was dealing with the great disappointment of my pre-college expectations: I had expected in college to change everything about me. In the years that followed, I dreamed about myself being back in a college situation, each dream realer than all of my other dreams, as I tried to live in that unfulfilled reality. And after that conversation with Tom and realizing that I would never get those friendships like everyone else had. I mourned this inside as I began to realize it, amplified by the thought that I could have formed friendships like that if I went to seminary, and I wondered, where do I go from here?
Then, as I watching the ending of the show Chuck, with Chuck and Sarah on the beach, I thought to myself, what do I have to be scared of? Chuck was a show that I related to on a personal level: a talented, smart guy who between getting kicked out of Stanford and getting dumped, he lost his self-esteem and ended up in a dead-end job for several years. But then a situation presented itself, and he made the most of it, and ended up with the girl he loved.
But those thoughts are just that: prisons in-and-of themselves. I may never get those days back, but I have something even better now: a church family that I’m really involved, a Bible study I’m starting, my photographs on the wall at Noyes Art Gallery, fifty-seven twitter followers, and this blog. Okay, the twitter and the blog make me a true looser, but nonetheless: I’ve found that I don’t have to live for what I don’t have. I can give thanks to God, and make something out of what I do have.
