Sometime during my first semester in college, I realized that the type of person I was was not good enough, and nowhere near the type of person I wanted to become. So I made a vow (of sorts) to find a way.
To put it all in context: a year earlier, I made the painful decision to leave my home church and essentially go churchless, not really knowing where I was going to land or what church would look like in the future. Although a few adults had stepped in to save the teens from all dropping out of church altogether by putting together an emergency youth group Bible study for the last half of the school year, I finished high school and began college with no mooring except whatever was in front of me to do, which at the time was schoolwork.
I'll go ahead and spoil this for you: unlike every other memory stone story I've shared on this blog, this one has no date, nor any kind of event or incident that prompted this thinking. Part of me, this many years out, is also wondering if I instead had this thought a year later, during the fall of my sophomore year, when I was going through a very tough season. It seems like it would make more sense, except I stubbornly seem to remember it the way I described in the opening paragraph. So I'm going to go with it.
Over J-term, I started attending Fellowship of Christian Athletes (FCA) meetings, including a lock-in one weekend, and a full day of broomball in the frigid January air in rural Minnesota. I should probably devote another blog post to do a further deep-dive on this, but I believe I experienced God revealing Himself to me that night, and prompting me to share my testimony in front of the other college students who were there. (I did not realize yet that I wasn't saved.)
Over the next few years, I had rises and falls, emotional highs and lows, successes and failures, as I went through college, graduated, embarked on post-college life in the middle of a recession, and after 1 1/2 years of struggle and failure, returned home between Christmas and New Year's to try yet again to figure life out. There were so many things I wanted to be, to do, and to have in life, and befuddled yet again as to how I wasn't making any progress on really any front.
Although I had seen counselors while in college, it wasn't until my late-twenties that the counseling I received over the next decade finally began to make a difference. Now, I have a lot of things that that version of myself from around twenty years ago pined for (not all, but many). But observing my own struggles coping with the precise difficulties that I've experienced solidly over the last three years (I've likened to "unlearning many things I learned in counseling") has led me to a realization: I can't make myself be a better person. All these different efforts, whether finishing school or restarting it a decade later, whether entering counseling or committing to growing in my faith, or any other major decision, were designed with the end goal that, if I were the person I wanted to be, I would be happy and life wouldn't be problematic. If there's anything that the last three years has taught me, it's that there will always be problems, whether it's problematic situations or problematic people.
At the end of the day, it's God who does the work of transformation:
being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus. Philippians 1:6, NIV
And sometimes, that work of transformation will take you places you don't want to go. But you go there anyway. You do it because you love God and you trust Him with all parts of this transformation work. After all, those who are saved love God and obey His commandments.
So I'm no longer vowing to be a better person anymore. I can't. But God can do what I can't.
I confess that even as of this post, I still resist being led to places I don't want to go. But as long as I repent (which I choose to do) God stands ready to forgive.
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