Thank goodness for second chances. And for grace. And for forgiveness. God gives these things willingly, I know; it’s an added perk when they’re given by people.
When I look back at high school, I don’t like the person I was. Most high school kids are entirely too concerned with trying to look cool, with what the rest of their classmates think of them, and with how popular they are. I was like that too, and it makes me sad. I feel like I wasted a huge amount of time trying to be someone I wasn’t, just so I could fit in with a certain group of kids who never really cared in the first place. And I missed out on a lot because of it.
I went to a really small high school. The kind of school where you know practically everyone by name, and if you don’t know their name you can at least recognize their face. There was this one kid… I knew him through a friend but I never really talked to him much. I was polite, but never overly friendly. Even though he was a nice guy, he was one of those kids who’d been labeled as being weird, and I was afraid of what would happen to my social status if I was seen talking to him too often. I’m ashamed to think I was so shallow, and hope I’ve changed at least a little bit.
I can’t remember who found one another first, but somehow, after we’d graduated and survived our first two years at different colleges, this boy and I started to talk to one another on-line. He was still weird, but I’d been out of high school just long enough to realize that the opinions of the kids I’d graduated with never meant anything in the first place, and that no one in the real world gives a rip about the social status one held when they were 17.
We still talk. Every day, practically. Somewhere along the line, he’s become one of my best friends. I’m not sure how that happened. Somewhere along the line, the things about him that I used to think were weird have become some of the things about him that I respect the most. I’m not sure how that happened, either. He’s never cared about what people think, and I view him as being grounded and self-confident. I wasn’t a Christian until the very end of my senior year, and so I didn’t understand his faith; now I can see that he’s got an amazing relationship with Christ. He’s honest and says what he thinks. He knows who he is.
At the end of the summer, he’s going to China for a year. To do missions work. I am so incredibly proud of him. I am so proud to be his friend. He’s never brought up the way I acted in high school, and what a complete and total snob I was. It’s like it doesn’t matter to him and he’s completely forgotten it. That’s more than I deserve, and I realize that.
Isn’t it kind of cool to think that that’s what Christ does for all of us, every day, on a much larger scale?
Thank goodness for second chances. And for grace. And for forgiveness.