College Courage

BY SARAH JENKINS

It is often said that someone will not realize the true nature of their environment until they escape from it - whether momentary or enduring. For a college student, this comes in the form of breaks, the beautifully packaged present awaiting students each December and May.

Speaking as a senior in college, I’ve seen many of these breaks come and go. Sometimes they’ve been characterized by trips to see family and other times by day trips to visit friends in nearby cities. Most of them by the return to my job in the local mall. However, most recently, my senior year winter break was characterized by none of those. In an effort to embrace my fleeting and final moments of home prior to graduation, I chose days with wide-open agendas and no pre-planned trips.

I rested and reflected, and there’s a whole lot that came into focus.

As I sat in my childhood bedroom in the small beach town that raised me, I realized the simple power of looking back at where I have been to propel me into the gleaming light of where I hope to go.

On my morning runs, I passed my middle school, a building that taught a timid yet quietly fierce Sarah seeking her voice in such formative years. She didn’t know her path for life but was fervent in her quest to find it; she immersed herself in varying genres of clubs on campus in desperate hopes of finding her niche. While middle school Sarah wasn’t aware that age 14 was only the beginning of that journey (and that she had a LONG way to go), she still searched.

In the afternoons, I picked my brother up from the high school I attended, one that, over the course of four years, served as the setting in which I found the voice I spent so much of middle school looking for. It’s where I met teachers that would be mentors beyond my high school tenure and the place that ignited a passion within me for the subjects I have chosen to study in college today. It is the one that nurtured me as a leader as I grew our Fellowship of Christian Athletes club to more than 400 students, the largest club at the school at the time. I learned then that the best was only yet to come and that I must choose to harness the power that I had at my fingertips.

College has allowed me that - but it was a choice. Then I reflected on what college has given me. I realized that it allowed me to use the voice I’ve been given and finally put it to work. Through leadership positions and internships attained, relationships I’ve cultivated through the years, and the overall beautiful brutality of the real world, I have gained a new lens through which to view life. Now, more than ever, I see young people taking all the lessons they’ve learned from their home bases and applying them to a world in which they are offered the opportunity to be a part of radical transformation.

We are told in Ecclesiastes, “For in everything there is a season, and a time in every matter under heaven.” (Ecclesiastes 3:1 NIV) Each time we look back on our lives, we will recognize the culmination of moments that have led us to where we are - here and now. It is what we do with those moments of reflection that define our ability to create a tangible shift for the world and the kingdom of God.

I may only be 21, and there is no doubt I have a lot of life to go, but I pray that I use what I’ve learned in each season to help navigate where I’m going next. My sincere hope is that I’ll always look back and remember each of life’s phases in my moments of solace, even when they get more few and far between.

The power of recognizing where we’ve been as a catalyst to where we’re going is a weapon provided by the Lord Himself and is one that we must all make use of. In this coming year, we must all recognize where He’s brought us from to fully conceptualize and honor where we’re going.