A wide-eyed girl from Delaware shows up in middle-of-nowhere Ohio at a tiny Christian university for who knows why except that she loved Jesus and liked softball and kind of had a thing for a guy who lived in Ohio. The Fall Bible Conference tugged her heart. Inner-city ministry tugged her heart. A boy she knew wasn't good for her tugged her heart. Tugged it and tugged it until it broke.
Sophomore Year
The wide-eyed girl from Delaware is not so wide-eyed anymore. She comes back to her school, hoping against hope that it will save her from a summer where nothing seemed to go her way. She is an RA and is leading other girls and feels the depth and the unbelievable desperation of inadequacy in her life as a people-pleaser.
And she comes to the conclusion that Jesus is the only One she needs to please anyway, and that somehow, some way, that is enough. She finally understands that a relationship and a boy and a marriage and a family and a thousand friends who love her and care about her and look up to her is not what satisfies--it is not the answer. But she's still trying to figure it out.
Junior Year
The wide-eyed girl comes back from a summer of change--too much change. Her eyes are a little less wide, a little more squinty, a little more cynical, a little less hopeful. Her family moves; they don't move to Maryland. They don't move to Missouri even. They move to Wyoming. And it's 26 hours away from her. And she acts like it's not a big deal, but it is. Deep down, she knows that it is.
She meets a boy, but she is skeptical of him. They date. She goes to Valencia, Spain on a 4-month trip to try to learn a language and live with a Spanish family and explore a different part of the world. She does. But she also finds out things about herself that she never knew--things that she hates--and spends way too much time alone and and finds out that there is more to the world than the United States and there are people that matter and there are situations she didn't know were even occurring. She continues to date the boy. She is still skeptical of him, but she likes the way he's committed and she likes his brown eyes and how he talks to her about theology. She likes him. She doesn't like him. She almost breaks up with him. She decides to stick it out.
Senior Year
The girl comes back to Cedarville with different eyes, no longer wide at all. She spends the summer with that same boy. She falls in love with him. And she didn't know what love would feel like, but she likes it. And then, all of a sudden, the beginning of school starts. And there's the Fall Bible Conference again, and the Worship Night, and there is a barbecue at her friends' house. But it's different now. She had always read about the room spinning when people get anxious, but she didn't know it could actually happen. For the first time ever, she felt awkward talking to people. She couldn't get the words out, and she felt alone in a room full of 20 people, people she called friends. Because in a room full of same, she felt so different.
So she left that barbecue. She just walked away. She couldn't do it. She just couldn't "do life" at Cedarville University for the next four months. After what she experienced and what she saw and the hopelessness and Jesuslessness she saw in Spain, she felt sick about her life at Cedarville. She didn't know how to live for Christ in a world that was so broken, but so covered up by Christian Hipsterdom and intentional coffee and Discipleship groups and even plain old ministry.
And from there, it got worse.
It started by hating unauthentic Christian words.
She hears words like "community" and "covenant" and "The Lord" and "your walk" and "prayer journal" and "obey" and she starts to fidget, unable to control her own body. She wants to punch a wall clean through. She hears it and feels the pang in her heart, and she pushes it down, and thinks: Stop thinking so negatively about this, Karly. You are better than this. You are.
But you know what?
I wasn't better than that. I wasn't.
You know who is?
Jesus is better than that. Jesus is better than the words that I hate and the people I don't understand and the Christian classes and the feeling of loneliness in a college full of 3,000 people.
Jesus is better than me. Did I have a right to feel that way? No. Should I have felt that way? No.
Did Jesus cover that for me? Yes. Yes yes yes yes. He did. He does.
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