High school was...an adventure full of highs and lows, exciting times and disappointing ones, days complete with life lessons and days totally void of purpose. There are two lessons, I suppose I'll call them that, that I kept coming back to since tenth grade. The first one relates directly to God, and the second isn't as direct.
I'll start with the more direct one, I suppose. In middle school I felt so close to God, I had days that I could almost hear Him in conversation with me. In high school, though, life began to fill with so much more than in earlier years, and I could feel God beginning to get pushed into the periphery of my life, but even when I put everything else aside and focused on God things still felt...different. Very rarely did I feel that closeness that I used to feel in middle school, and there were moments that I began to doubt God's presence in my life.
Only recently did I truly begin to understand why this was happening. As we progress through the stages of life, God progresses with us. While He is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow, we are not, and because of that God reaches us in different ways. Middle school was a time full of developing out of childhood, finding out where I fit in, and discovering who I was going to be. It was awkward, and, at times, it was difficult to navigate, and I needed God to be, well, extremely loud and incredibly close. While personal development continues throughout life, and certainly in high school, it's a much different experience, and we are beginning to prepare for the rest of life, gaining much more independence than in years prior.
My faith through high school was about just that, having faith. It was as if God was saying "Okay, we got through these three years just fine, but now you need to trust me when I tell you that I will always be near just a little bit more."
Perhaps I can create an analogy to a story that my mom told me when we were going through photographs from my younger years. There was a picture of me in a row boat in the lake at my grandparents' mountain home, attached to shore by a long rope. Thinking back on that vacation I didn't remember being attached to shore, I remembered rowing independently on the lake, and I giggled, thinking that I was attached to this rope and didn't even know it. My mom, however, told me that I had desperately wanted that rope attaching me to the shore (not that she would have let me go out unattached, anyway), that I needed to know that that rope was there reigning me in. Middle school was like my mom's (true) version. God was obviously there, and I was comforted by knowing without a doubt that He was with me. High school was more like my (false) thoughts. I didn't realize that I was attached to shore all along, but I trusted that my mom would make sure nothing bad would happen to me. I could have gotten too far away, though, to a point where I felt like she wouldn't be able to reach me if she needed to, but all along I was attached to where she was. I have to trust in God that He is always here, and recognize even in the times that I am unsure I am still anchored to the everlasting Lord.
The second lesson from high school is about priorities. Tomorrow when I am beginning to tear up during Graduation it will not be because I will miss the structure of high school, or because I will miss the subjects (if I really wanted to I could take similar classes at Grove City). I will be crying because it is a goodbye of sorts with the people who I've grown to hold so dearly. The people in life are the important part. God sent us here to interact and love one another, and to develop a relationship with His Son. That is our first purpose in life, not mastering rotations and torque in Physics class (though that could be a means to fulfilling our first purpose.)
I'm not saying that we shouldn't be focused on academics or careers, anyone who knows me knows that I would never say that those things are unimportant, but this year especially, my senior year, I've learned that it is easy to put our priorities in the wrong order. Years from now it is unlikely that I will remember how to solve the integral of an exponential function, yet I know that I will remember the people in my life right now. Before senior year I often put academics ahead of anything else in my life, but now I see that there are some things that can come before, or at least equivalent to, them. There is one thing that must come before them. God. In all things God must be the first priority in my life. With God first, everything else will fall into place, as He'll guide me towards the proper path.
So I suppose the first lesson that I learned was about my relationship with God, and the second was about following and serving Him, neither of which is much different from the other.
Above all remember this - "For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only son, so that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life." (John 3:16)
