4 years, 3 majors, and countless memories later and im still here...

In another month or so it will be four years since I started college. wow. That sounds crazy when I say it out loud. And its even crazier when I think about how different my life is now from when I was that 18 year old freshman with no idea what being in college would really entail. I was the baby finally kicked out of the nest when I came to college in the fall of 2008 and I hardly knew anyone. I admittedly had a miserable first semester of college but by the time spring rolled around I had found a new family in YoungLife. So I have spent the last four years living in Milledgeville, walking North Columbia and West McIntosh almost everyday, back and forth, between friends houses where I have been so blessed to see friends grow into the people that they've become. There have been people that I have watched come and go from here and so many of them have hugely influenced my time here. I've gotten to experience so many things with so many different people. I've been thrown into the best community that I have ever known with people that are real and raw and intentional about loving me. I can't even count the amount of times I have spent with some of my best friends, laughing so hard I start crying or crying so hard the only thing left to do is start laughing. I have been prayed over, led to scripture, and been spoken truth into and just plain loved so much. If someone ever would have told me that this is what I would spend my college years being surrounded by, I don't think I ever would have or could have believed it. Mainly because I'm not sure I really even knew it existed. But God did and it was His plan all along for me to live here.

And now, a huge chunk of my friend group has graduated. The people that I started college with, that have seen me through every stage of college, are leaving. Last Wednesday marked 4 out of my 5 best friends leaving Milledgeville for good and I'll be honest, I cried like a baby. Its so strange to think of what my last semester in college and last year in Milledgeville will be like without them. Things are definitely changing and I am being taught more than ever that there is a season for everything. And I am scared. But also clinging to the truth that the Lord never allows pain without the birth of something new and in that I am also hopeful. I am about to embark on a year that is going to look a lot different that the past four years. I am going to undoubtedly be the old lady living in a house with four other girls that will be sophomores and still trying to figure out what they are doing. And in some ways I'm a little jealous of that, haha. But really who am I kidding? I'm still trying to figure out what I'm doing.

So, it will be a year of changes.Who knows what is going to happen? Either way I'm glad that God's plans are better than mine.

TTFN,
Jessica