You see, I attended a tiny Christian school (and when I say tiny, I mean I graduated with ten other kids), and the school only goes through eighth grade. And you have no idea how much work it took to graduate from my school. Okay, so maybe it doesn't take a whole lot of work to graduate, but I graduated with A's and B's (and maybe one C in Algebra, but hey, it's Algebra), and let me tell you, THAT took some work!
At graduation, each person in my class had to give a speech. Most of us talked about the memories we made at our school, and some talked about what they loved about everyone in our class. But our student speaker, who just happened to be the most well-liked (I hesitate to use the word popular) girl in our small school and my best friend, definitely had to most impact on me.
She talked about how thankful she was that God chose the eleven of us to grow up together. She shared some memories she had about each person and one word to describe us (I got-- and I quote-- "awesome-- sometimes" *wink*). But the most insightful thing she said was this:
"People walk in and out of our lives. Some stay for a while and then leave, but others leave footprints on our hearts."
That's definitely what my class has been to me. We've loved and laughed and cried and fought and learned and shared. There's no two people who just absolutely hate each other. I definitely have some people that I find hard to get along with, but at the end of the day, I know that they've always got my back and I've got theirs. Sound too good to be true? Let me share a story about this:
There's this guy in my class who just annoyed the heck out of me. He's a total nerd, and goes through these phases where he gets totally obsessed with something and learns everything about it and totally exhausts the subject. This year it was anything to do with audio/visual stuff and his guitar. It was all he could talk about! Now do you see why this annoyed me?
Anyway, we fought a lot. It was usually just stupid little arguments, but a few weeks ago, he said some stuff that really offended me, and I offended him right back. We didn't talk much during the last few weeks of school.
But then came our end-of-the-year class trip. Three days of bonding. Yippee. We continued to fight for the first day, which resulted in a late-night dodge ball battle to the death. Not fun.
One of the things we did on our trip was spend the day at an amusement park. And if you must know, I'm afraid of heights. Guess who else was. That's right, the guy I couldn't stand. This meant we were automatically paired up and stuck on the ground while the rest of my class rode the biggest, baddest roller coasters in the park over and over and over again. I knew this would present some problems, considering we weren't exactly on speaking terms. So I called a truce. I said we had to make this trip as enjoyable as possible, and fighting all the time wasn't the way to do this. He agreed, and we ended up spending pretty much the whole day together.
And it was awkward, but it was fun! I kept him company while he filmed our friends braving the roller coasters and even convinced him to ride a few with me. The rest of our trip was so much fun, and we ended up spending a lot of it together. My classmates were astonished that we could hang out for more than five minutes without me being on the verge of yanking his head off.
So I think the biggest lesson I learned during my last year with my class was that fighting isn't worth your time, and it's definitely not pleasing to God. If you can stop arguing for five minutes and just try to get to know the person you can't stand, you might just discover that they're not as annoying as you thought you were and end up with a new friend.
Leaving my class is very emotional for me. I'm the only one not going to high school with at least one of them next year. I have to brave the big bad world of high school all by myself, without the people I've grown up with and learned to love. But I know I can do it because God is with me and my classmates will always have a place in my heart. My friend summed it up perfectly:
You know it's friendship when you're happy to see them, but you know it's love when you're sad to see them go.
No comments:
Post a Comment