Simple and Real

I've learned a lot of things during my first year at four-year college. 

I've learned how much I love knowledge and learning; I've learned how much I love big old lecture halls and complicated essays and professors that ask me to give my opinion; I've learned how to analyze statistics and conjugate the past subjunctive of Spanish verbs.

I've conversed with people from all walks of life, ranging from conservative Christians to liberal pagans. I love walking by the bell tower as the autumn leaves fall down out of the crisp blue sky; I love curling up in a leather chair in one of the student gathering places and watching the snow fall outside; I love walking into the shiny new buildings as the spring blossoms nod gently on the trees. I love college and I love the person that it is making me.

However, there is one huge, overarching truth that I have learned from college - and it has been surprising to me.

College has taught me that I love things that are simple, and I love things that are real.

Sewing. Gardening. Babies. Little white country houses. Heirloom farms. Old quilts. Fabric-bound books. Good manners. Mothers and sons. Fathers and daughters. Calico dresses. Old fiddles and violins. Potlucks. Simple country churches. Real Bible preaching.

I love all of those things so much more than I ever knew I did. They're so simple, yet so real. When you strip away all the layers of philosophy and dogma and hypothesis and debate in the world, you're left with these things. Things you can feel with your hands and your heart.

These are the things that I want to surround myself with as I continue to grow up and build my life. Yes, I love to learn; yes, I love theories and debates and logic; yes, I'm learning some things that will be useful in my career. But all of this college fluff isn't what's real. Theories change and twist and fade - God and His Word and the beauty He created do not.

I want to have a little house with yellow curtains in the kitchen windows, and a garden and some cats ... I want to marry a man that I love and trust, and I want us to have children, and enjoy them through the sunshiny smiles and the late-night temper tantrums ... I want to grow and build and teach with my own hands and my own voice. To build - that's the operative word. To make things that exist in the real world, not just on a computer chip or book page. I want to create and give and leave things for my children to enjoy.

Simple things. Beautiful things. This is the greatest lesson college has taught me so far.

Love in Christ,
Vicki