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Colleges

We had a really wonderful weekend with Dave’s friends from college, reminiscing and connecting and letting our kids run wild.  And so I’ve been thinking about college….

For me, college was one of those remarkable times of connection.  A unique place where people from a variety of walks of life live in common, where it’s more difficult to judge people by their kind of home or make of car.  Kids with famous/wealthy parents can room or be just next door to kids from ghettos.

I’d come from a large high school with around 560 kids in my class, where I’d found my niche with a small group of other somewhat geeky, studious, introverted types and a really solid youth group that spent lots of time playing “Capture the Flag” and frequently turned hang-out times into prayer meetings.  But when I told them that I was applying only to secular colleges, everyone was slightly horrified, feeling certain that this announcement was really prelude to certain apostasy.

I didn’t particularly mind.  I’d never done anything in a way that at all resembled going with the flow.  So, heading off to the spiritual desert of a secular campus wasn’t too big a step, and I really wanted a college that had some kind of academic reputation.

And what I found, besides the expected carousing, was a vibrant group of Christian students, many of whom stepped out of homes that found their spirituality strange.  They were people who staggered out of bed for 6:30 a.m. prayer meetings, who plunged intellectually and passionately into Bible studies, who proposed day-long fasts before Chuck Colson spoke, some who hung out in frat and sororities, others who avoided the entire party scene, some of whom became pastors and missionaries, others who worked for the Washington Post or became doctors.

But I also found people who weren’t Christians that I could relate to, who were smart and fun, who hated Christianity and loved judo and philosophy or kids and cards.

College became a place to figure out my own beliefs, to try on some that I would eventually discard and to taste other that I would hold onto for the long run.

Somehow, I wasn’t really shaken by the blatant wantonness easily available.  I attribute that to having come from a public school where I was used to being different, where I’d already made a stand almost unconsciously.  But maybe it was all the character my parents instilled and the preparation of heading off to Governor’s School and the Air Force Academy Summer Program and figuring out how to make my way there.

So, I hope in that far, far, distant future when my kids are choosing colleges, that they’ll choose secular colleges, places where being a Christian is not the expected or the assumed and definitely not where it is the popular choice.  That somehow mitigates some of the basics of Christianity.  On the other hand, listening to my husband’s and his friends tales of their small, secular New England college, I’m not sure I want to thrust them into the persecuting environment of a New England school either.  So, I’m hoping for a southern or western secular school.  Is that specific enough?

Of course, when the actual decision comes to be made, who knows if anybody’ll listen to their old mom’s opinion.