At the end of the previously mentioned summer, I turned 21. A friend named Matt, who had worked with us over the summer, met up with me at a local restaurant, where I ordered a "Red Dog" beer. I didn't know what I was doing, was clueless about beer, and hated the taste of it. But I drank the whole thing because I didn't want to look lame around my friend.
Around the same time, the college made me move into a dorm room with a freshman (I was a senior). It became a apparent almost instantly that we had nothing in common. After a couple months, he moved in with a friend so I had the room to myself. It was fun. It was a little weird being a senior living with mostly underclassmen, but I had no prior experience to compare it to, so I enjoyed it enough.
To be honest, this was a tough year for me. I was incredibly infatuated with a couple of women, struggled with adjusting to life on my own, found a few good friendships, and a few that I kept up even though I knew they weren't very good ones. Without realizing it at the time, I turned to being insanely busy to help feel a bit less lonely (which of course didn't work). Besides keeping a full schedule of 16 credit hours of classes, I:
--worked in the kitchen 8-10 hours a week, sometimes in the middle of the night
--became the worship leader for all chapels, which met 3 times a week
--acted as head of the team behind "More Than That", a student-led additional worship time meeting on Wednesday nights.
Of course, even with all that, I procrastinated with many games of ping-pong, interesting conversations, and Mariokart marathons. Through it all the loneliness and inner struggles lingered on. I had a lot of acquaintances, but only a few real friends. Unfortunately, I was blinded to their reaching out because I was so infatuated with others (let this serve as a warning to the reader to be applied in your own life).
Despite the struggles, I got a ton of good experience as a worship leader, I had a lot of laughs, and a lot of relational experience. I had always been an honor-roll/dean's list student so I graduated with about a 3.8 GPA in early May of 2001. A week after graduating, I payed $500 to UPS my library ahead of me, packed my Ford Festiva to the gills (You shoulda seen it!) and drove to Oviedo, Florida.
I had already decided in my junior year of college where I would go to seminary. I didn't know anyone when I moved to Florida, the seminary had found me a place to rent a room for $200/month. I moved in with a retiree who smoked cheap cigars in the house, and his huge black lab, and my fellow rentee, a Taiwanese RTS student. I applied to all the local retail stores for a job, and the first to call me was Publix (the one at 419 and Lockhart). I started working in the meat market, where I'd work for the next four years to put myself through Seminary.
I tried one Sunday attending an OPC church I'd heard about, but it was completely on the other side of town, and my host, Dick, mentioned his son Chuck was a pastor at nearby Willow Creek PCA. I attended in the morning and at night (like a good Reformed Dutchman...) and liked the evening crowd because most everyone was my age or a few years older. Nearly everyone was associated with the seminary in some way. I found a community where people accepted me as I was, I felt like they instantly new who I was, faults and all, but genuinely wanted me to be part of them. Thus began my journey with Willow Creek at Night and Sojourn.
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