Keep your coins. I want change.

Well sports fans it's then end of another era. I graduate from SLCC this Saturday ending my three year stay in the great city of St. Louis, Missouri. Most of my friends are graduating with the Bachelors degree and I (although I have second semester, Jr. level credits) am graduating with my Associates. In a way I feel like I wimped out. I was so close to a bachelors and I just threw in the towel. The fact of the matter is: I wasn't happy there. I had never been happy there. I settled on SLCC because I didn't think to plan for the future and I didn't want to do a lot of extra work. It was cheap, it was easy, it was safe, and it made my mother happy. I don't regret any of the time that I spent there. I love the people I've met and built strong relationships with, I love the professors who have taught me, I love the knowledge that I've learned, I love that my time there has brought me closer to God, and I love the life I got to live. I am blessed because of my time there. What I do regret is not seeing that my heart was not in line with what God wanted for me. I wanted easy and God wanted more than what was convenient.

I don't think He wanted me to settle for a life of being married before the age of 22. I don't think He wanted me to settle for the path that had already been tread by my sisters. I don't think He wanted me to settle for the safety of my five year plan of school, marriage, kids, and Africa. It's funny to think of the 18 year-old-girl that first set foot on that campus and how she is almost nothing like the 21 year-old me now. Different dreams, different focus, different plans, different person.

Last Saturday (May 1) Mandy and Kayla and I took a day trip up to Chicago to hang out and we were supposed to take Mandy to check out SAIC, but it never happened. Somewhere between eating lunch at Gino's East and making faces in "The Bean" in Millennium Park it hit me that this was going to become my new city. That at the end of the month I was headed into a spiral of new, well, everything and I wasn't doing much to prepare for it. Everything started to get real, these plans I made many, many months ago were starting to breath and exist in more places than just my mind. I'm going to be moving to a new city, with new people, knowing very few people, and embarking on a whole new life direction. This should scare anyone, but (although I am a little nervous) I'm more excited than anything.

I'm interested to see how different the me now will be from the me after Summit's over.

That's all for now, I'm sleepy, but I promise to try to do a better job of updating this thing from now on.