As I mentioned in the last post I did some time alone walking around campus.
Mostly it was to get some final goodbyes out of my system. Of course they are for me, not for the buildings, but there is something significant about standing at a place you considered home for as long as you have lived anywhere else your whole life and to say goodbye. The South Quad was hard because of the way I ended my involvement w/ midnight soccer. I still feel bad about that. I said goodbye to freaky-engineering-guy sitting at Grainger, and the bone-yard. I didn’t make it to the balcony to take a last look…maybe in the spring I’ll do that.
It is really hard to lose all that. It is like losing your family sometimes. I mean no longer will I be at UIUC w/ my friends the way I was.
Well, while I was walking I spent a lot of time praying, and I felt like God said this to me: “This is going to be really hard, and saying goodbye like this sucks a whole lot. Moving away sucks a lot, and it is going to suck even more before it gets good. But when it gets good, it will be great. And MN is where you need to be regardless…it is time to move on.”
That hurt, but in a powerful way. I feel better now than I did. Also, I talked w/ Rob and Seth and Dirk my principal roommates (who I lived w/ the longest) and all the other gang too. It was awesome. I’m really thinking I need to make it to ACEN now to hang out before Rob graduates and Dirk moves to Japan.
In my toast at the wedding I said “from an old best friend, to new best friends.” That is a tough statement for me to make. So much of how I see myself is wrapped up in my friends and the people around me. So leaving to start a church and seeing my friends have new best friends / get married is like growing rapidly and being ripped in half at the same time. I wonder if it was like that for Dirk when I got married? On one hand I gain a great friend by proxy…on the other, Dirk is leaving the country now.
Well, other than that, I felt like God told me (during a Schmelzer sermon on the way there) I need to pray that we have 150 people attending in a year. I’m not sure if it is a promise, or a faith building exercise. But I believe that it could happen, and so I will pray for it. I figure saying it publicly makes me a little more exposed…which is probably a good thing here.
That is probably enough for now. I need to write about lent later, but I’m not sure if I can ask some questions of people in my blog w/o being too personal. I’ll think about that later though, back to work now.