High School Memories

From time to time I like to pause the theological stuff for reflections down memory lane. For the first time in a long time I thought about my high school graduation. Now this could have been due to the fact that I was fortunate to recognize some young people who are graduating in our church in a week. But its been about 13 years since I graduated high school and I never really thought back about it too much. High school was an awkward period for alot of people but it was definitely for me. I wasn't a believer at this time in my life and was searching for my place in my school. I just wanted to fit in. 9th grade is always the strangest because your in a new school, you no longer are cool and your trying to find a group to fit in with. I managed to pursue my love for music by doing several music classes. If the gift of music wasn't a part of my life who knows where I would have ended up. I put all of my energy into the musical groups I was a part of. Though parts of high school still haunt me (those clothes and hair), its a period of time that I grew as a person. Graduating from high school became a transition into the real world (and the high cost of college). In a week thousands of high schoolers will be graduating with dreams of college, or a tech school of some sort and saying goodbye to old buildings with funny lunch ladies, and smelly bathrooms with no toilet paper and broken sinks, principals who come onto the intercom to announce something of absolutely no importance, to fat security guards who if you ran .00003 of a mile from them they'd die, to vending machines that worked until that kid who decided to bust it open with his foot destroyed your chance of ever eating from them again, to goofy hairstyles, corny dances, stonewashed jeans, football games where you win the homecoming game 62-7, then lose every single game of the season, to yearbooks that you wish were burned up in a blazing inferno. But there are also some of the good things like putting whole bag of M&M's into a persons engine, your best friend getting puked on by a homeless man while waiting in line at the movie theater, to taking your senior pictures in your work clothes (I worked at Food Lion back when they had to wear a blue/green apron+nametag), to spending 6 hours at your friends house trying to break the 5 inch thick ice on his pond, to getting your shirt ripped off because it was caught in a tire from a moving car, to pelvic thrusting your band teacher during the school's very public Christmas concert dressed in a Santa Suit, to mispelling jipped (I spelling jiped) on a blackboard then getting in trouble for it and spending 6 hours in the teachers office, to telling your English teacher (when she incorrectly throws you out of class thinking you were talking--when you WERE NOT!) that your going to burn her house down with kerosene, and last but not least realizing that everything is going to change in your life. College graduation is very similar, but thats a diffrent memory for now.

Be Blessed