To Geneva

Today marks one week to the day I marry the love of my life who I met in this very location. I walked up to Geneva’s campus in order to consider today the new beginnings of my exercise journey. I was not expecting the strange emotions that would overcome me as I stepped foot on its grounds. The sadness, the longing, and more importantly the peace. I’m sitting in one of the wooden chairs outside of Old Main that I’ve used maybe three times in the course of my Geneva career and for the first time in three months I feel at home in Beaver Falls. When I came here four years ago, I was fleeing—a break up, a broken home, and the fear of insignificance. I now live in this town and will be starting my married life only a few miles from the college. Campus is empty, not yet filled by the variety of students destined to learn in its walls this academic year. My friends are gone, very few of them to return again save for the reunions far off in our future. One reunion comes quite shortly, as a select group of dear friends gathers in southwestern pa once more to celebrate my union with my dear one in just a weeks time. There’s an emptiness in knowing that I will most likely never walk these grounds as a student again, sitting in a class learning how to care for the needs of others or learning about the One sufficient to meet all our needs. Or if I would, I will not do so with my best friend since freshmen year by my side. I will not sit with an odd assortment of guys for each meal nor play a game that we created every other Saturday. I cannot simply walk into a professors office anymore nor linger far too long after class to discuss my life or my learning. So many things have changed and with that change comes a certain longing, a loneliness that something very good and very filling has gone from my life. Yet there is a peace as I sit here, knowing that this campus changed me. That this campus was home to me, is home to me, and all the good that happened here was real. My time with Geneva as a student has ended, but for some it is just beginning and I pray that they find the fulfillment I have. This has been my season of change, a summer of unknown and a future of endless possibilities. Thank you, Geneva, for all that you’ve given to me. Thank you, Lord, that as I stumbled forward blindly, you were patiently leading me here, growing me here.