Nostalgia and looking towards the future

Well, hello. It's been a while since I opened Blogger, a while since I felt the urge to form my thoughts into words that I'd consider jettisoning onto the internet. But today, on a Tuesday afternoon where I have 193+ other things to do (as is always the case when I feel the urge to blog), I am feeling nostalgic. 

I am about to complete the last semester of six years at my university. I didn't like being here, for a long time. I only reluctantly embraced the identity of being a college student and a Jayhawk. I resented my fellow students for being too loud, for making the "traffic" worse (in quotes because we really have nothing to complain about in my little town), and for not having the maturity of 35-year-olds and the interests of 75-year-olds (not a very rational expectation of under-twenty-five-year-olds).

But somehow, I've grown fond of this place in spite of myself. Changing my major helped (tremendously!) but also the incredible people I've met here, students and professors alike (and maybe a pretty neat postdoc, but more on that later). I am beyond excited to graduate and enter my next season of life, which will involve a little less coffee and a lot more exercise, but I also can't help thinking throughout this semester of how I can perhaps count on one hand how many more times I'll see a classmate or my advisor, and how their lives will continue on but my academic pursuits at this university stop here. 

God has been so gracious to me. He has given me a heart for this campus that goes beyond the generic hope for the salvation of nameless individuals I usually preferred not to be around, which is what I had when I started here. Though sometimes I am still impatient with my classmates, the Lord has given me eyes to see college kids with a compassion that I did not have, and a desire to see the people in my cohort walk in freedom.

I don't know what that looks like when I leave KU. To be honest, I haven't been sure what that can or should look like while I'm here, either. But I don't want to underestimate the time that I have left as a student (31 days, but who's counting?). If I have two minutes or two hours with a person, I want to be present, open, and oriented towards their needs and not my own. Jesus said that the greatest person is the one who is the servant of everyone. Is that how I live in my department? Viewing my role as the person who is there to serve, just like my king?

It's a pretty busy season right now. Each day is split between wrangling the research article I am writing, skimming books as rapidly as possible, translating articles for clients, and preparing for my wedding in June. (Remember that postdoc I mentioned? :)) People keep saying how fast time is going — truly, it does seem that someone is holding down the "fast forward" button on the remote. But most of the time, I wish time would fly even faster, to skip past the work and get to graduation and then my wedding. I know marriage won't solve all my problems, but it's difficult not to feel that things will be a little easier when I'm no longer a wedding planner-graduate student.

But work is good, and I don't want to rush past this season. It's okay to wish my work load wasn't quite so full (it won't always be) but I don't want to reject work just because it's work. That, too, is a gift, just like the rest that God also gives us. So I will set this post aside, and go back to The Seventh Member State (there's a plug for you, Megan Brown. It was nice to meet you at the conference last month). À la prochaine, readers.