I missed out on my freshman year of college because I was in a long-distance relationship. I had been dating this girl for a couple of years during high school and we had made the decision to go to different colleges. We made this decision based on the fact that we did not want to rob each other of the full college experience and we wanted to prove to each other that we were not dependent upon one another. Looking back, it was one of the most mature decisions I have ever made.
Despite our best efforts to the contrary, our relationship still dominated my first year of college. We talked on the phone every night, emailed throughout the day, and visited each other when we could on the weekends. Needless to say, aside from this relationship I had little time for anything but studying. I was alright with that at first, but soon it began to wear on me that I was not getting to do the things that I saw my friends doing.
Near the end of my freshmen year and at the start of my sophomore year, I began to get involved in activities on campus. I flourished. I became a Resident Assistant, started playing in the chapel praise band, joined the Student Chaplains, and a litany of other things.
As is so common with high school relationships ours began to struggle under the weight of expectations. She expected me to spend more time with her, I expected her to understand that I was experiencing college, but we both expected that things would continue on as they always had.
I think that it was this struggle, along with the peer pressure surrounding me, that led me to decide that there was something more than what I was currently living. Unfortunately for me, I initially decided that the party scene was what was missing in my life. I slid right into it nicely and adopted many of the habits that are so common for college students and fulfilled every stereotype of the college male. The other unfortunate part of this whole process is that I was living two separate lives. There was the praise-band-playing, student chaplain-R.A. and there was the stereotypical college partier.
It did not take me long to realize that this was not what I was searching for in my quest for what was missing in my life. In all actuality it took me farther away from where I needed to be. It all came to a head on Good Friday, during my sophomore year.
After a particularly rough night of partying I awoke with a strange realization that something was different about the day. I was oddly aware of the significance of this day to my Christian faith, but yet I was still drunk from the night before. As I struggled through my haze, I began to realize that I had a choice to make. I could not continue to lead these two lives and pretend like nothing was wrong. I had to go one way or the other.
Through what I firmly believe to be Divine Intervention, the college praise band was playing a special, Good Friday service at my church; I was scheduled to speak as part of the service. In my preparations for the night, the Lord led me to Romans chapter eight in the Holy Scriptures. There I found words that told me that no matter what I had done, God would still love me, and that He was what I was searching for to fill my life. He was the “more” for which I searched.
I was in a band at the time and we wrote a song about that night. It was called “Paradigm Destroyed.”
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