Graduation Weekend...the end of Spring 2005

I want to cry, and feel I must, and yet the tears won’t come. Lives changing…people moving…growing up, and going…

It’s not ‘see you later’ or ‘see you next year’, it’s goodbye. Maybe forever. At least for a very long time. My mind can barely wrap around the idea. And I know in only a year or two; some of my nearest, dearest, closest friends will be saying goodbye then too…and my heart can barely bear it. I remember one of my first memories at Liberty University. It was my first meal in the dining hall (what we affectionately refer to as the ‘Rot) and as I was standing in line, waiting for my first bland, mass-produced, undercooked meal, I saw two girls, perhaps a couple years older than I, embrace. They seemed to be friends who were reuniting. I don’t remember their faces, the color of their hair, or anything else. But I do remember the feeling I had in that moment.

I can’t imagine being close enough to anyone here to hug them like that.

That was before I met Lindsay. And over a year before I met John. And a time in my life before a host of now extremely important people were even in my consciousness. I wonder if it is that same feeling parents get when their children egocentrically say, “Can you now imagine life before I came along?”

When examining these thoughts in spiritual terms it only leads me to one conclusion. We human beings despise goodbyes for a much greater purpose than simply missing a friend. We long for eternity. We long for infinite relations and existence. And eternal life is only found in God. C.S. Lewis once said that our every longing has some way of being satisfied. For carnal desires there is sex. For hunger there is food. For thirst there is water. And for the longing for life beyond what we know, there is eternity with God.