To My Freshman Self: Look More Like Jesus, Even if it Means Rejection
This week I have the blessing of sharing a post from my daughter, Camille. Camille just began her freshman year of college. In her post below, she offers wisdom for herself as a high school freshman. I’m sure you’ll be blessed by the hard truths she wrestled with. -John
Hi high school freshman me! It is future college freshman you, writing to encourage you in hard truths that you're going to wrestle with over the next four years.
As I begin college, I am borderline-overwhelmed with the repercussions and magnitude of my sin patterns. On many occasions I have found myself giving in to my urge to please people, adapting who I am to a “better” version of myself so that people can only see the side of me that best fits my surrounding environment. I have found myself tempering my boldness. I have suppressed my passion, my ambition, and most of all, my relationship with Christ.
I expected to go into a college theater program where everyone would have the same belief systems as me. I was wrong. I feel like I stand alone amongst my peers politically, spiritually, and in character. It's so hard. Giving in to the false narrative that my worth, strength, and power come from within is tempting. Believing that loving myself is the key to unlocking my best is alluring. Making friends is easier if everyone has their “own” truth and no one’s truth interferes with another’s. But although “you do you” is comfortable for a season, it is ultimately ungrounded. Subjective truth shifts. Yet these fallacies are enormously tempting in order to receive the acceptance and adoration of people.
And here is the thing younger me, I am firm in my beliefs and know in my heart and mind that the truth of Jesus Christ is the only truth with any merit. But in social interactions I have discovered I pull my punches, vaguely brushing over hard truths in order to gain the acceptance of people. I am more concerned about my short-term relational safety than my long term kingdom growth. I choose to protect myself in my pride and fear rather than loving the people around me well by standing up for the truth. This is terrifying. If I continue to live in this way, not only am I sabotaging the increased fullness of my relationship with God, I am concurrently sabotaging the spiritual well-being of those around me. These weighty questions about ultimate truth might seem like something to worry about when you’re grown up, but please know that there is no better time to begin deepening your understanding.
Hear ye high school freshman me, you cannot control what people think about you. I know that you believe that if you just act in the right way, you can change the way people think about you. Yes, I know it has “worked” in some scenarios before, but that lifestyle is unsustainable. It is exhausting. It is overwhelming. Ultimately, and people will form opinions that will hurt you no matter what you do. Do not trust your heart with them. Your heart is not their responsibility and they do not know how to care for it well.
Give your heart to Jesus. He knows you. He loves you. He has given up everything so that he can be with you. Run to him. He wants your heart; it’s the only thing he asks for. He wants to meet you in all of the pain, brokenness, regret, ugliness and hurt. He knows you are in pain, and he will not leave you alone in that pain. You will feel pain again, but do you trust him enough to let him take care of you, to meet and fulfill you in that pain over your desperate attempts to protect and heal yourself?
I know that releasing control over how people see you is scary. What if they find out who you really are? A disappointment? A failure? How could anything be okay again after people figure out the real you? But Camille! Guess what! That is not who you are! The lies you tell yourself, the fears you have decided to believe, that is not you. You are priceless, worthy, treasured, enough, precious, and oh so beloved! When you relent control, it's true, people will see you as you really are. But who you really are is so much better than this person you pretend to be. As you humbly release control of your relationships, your self-image, your schoolwork your life, Jesus can and will more fully radiate through you. You will experience a fullness of joy like never before. Living as he has truly made you, shapes your heart to become more like him.
I know this is scary and exciting, and what I say right now may add to the fear, but it's worth mentioning. In the gospel of John, Jesus is preaching in the synagogue, and for almost the entirety of John chapters 7 through 8 the people are challenging, ridiculing, and ultimately trying to stone Jesus. In Chapter 8 verse 48 John recounts “The Jews answered him ‘Are we not right in saying that you are a Samaritan and have a demon?’” In that time Samaritans were despised among the Jews, so calling Jesus a Samaritan and also claiming he had a demon was essentially a full-on Jewish verbal roast. If they were in a poetry slam that's probably the line that would have won. A few verses later the crowd attempts to stone him.
These passages are amazing to me. Not only because of the way that Jesus boldly responds to the Jew's rebukes (not ever shying away from the truth, but declaring it boldly, despite their horrid reactions). Or the way Jesus trusts God to protect him from the crowds' attempts to capture and kill him (a specific verse I think is so cool that John repeats twice, is that despite how they tried to arrest him they could not because it was not yet his time. I mean, what?! That's insanely cool that God holds time and providence as simply as that). But because Jesus is hated. He is despised by everyone. Yet that does not stop him from declaring the truth in love.
Camille, you don't have to be liked. The more you look like Jesus the more you will be rejected by this world. Your life is not and cannot be a pursuit of adoration of man. This is the path of destruction. The more you release control and let yourself look like Jesus, you may become ridiculed, mocked, and hated. But Jesus will meet you there. He has experienced the fullness of that and longs for you to further his kingdom and declare his goodness throughout creation.
So as you go through high school, you may not be liked, you may not be popular, you may feel unwanted. But you are priceless. You are loved. Jesus is celebrating you. He is celebrating your kingdom work, and rejoicing in the unique beautiful way he made you. So go shine! Don’t be afraid of being “too much,” don't squelch your passion, don't dull your joy. God has made you radiantly. Go, be radiant, be bold, shine his love and grace to the world.
Your future self,
Camille :)
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