First Published in the Tri Town Transcript Nov 7, 2016
By Esther C. Baird
One day, when I was a senior in college, I watched two older women outside my apartment run towards each other. They squealed and hugged and jumped.
My friend breezed by and laughed. “Look, there’s my mom! She’s visiting for homecoming and that’s her roommate. They haven’t been back in 20 years!”
I smiled, but secretly wondered, what was their problem!? Why had they waited so long to return? Why had they waited until they were…old??
Regular readers will guess where this is going because, yes, recently my husband and I attended our 20th college reunion outside Chicago. And, besides a few visits immediately after graduation, I hadn’t been back. I realized what those moms (who, I now understand were in the prime of their lives, and not even close to old) knew, which is that life goes crazy and suddenly 20 years have passed.
I had loved college. It had been an amazing four years and I left ready to conquer the world. I declared I’d never have a desk job. Rather, I planned to either be a famous television personality or a world traveling disaster chaplain helping those in need.
It was hard to accomplish those things from my early jobs in windowless cubicles at . . . desks. And neither of my presumed future careers involved making lunches every day or driving hours and hours between play practice and soccer and church clubs.
My college-aged self couldn’t have fathomed that while I wouldn’t report headlines from major world events, I would report to my eldest daughter that if she didn’t put her laundry away there would be a major [unpleasant] event in her life. I couldn’t have envisioned back then that I wouldn’t pull people out of war torn rubble and try to help them repair their lives, but I would pull dog hair out of the sink and try to repair my younger daughter’s backpack zipper.
The collision of present day Esther with college-age Esther made me nervous. I knew I had found different ways to follow my dreams and use my talents. I knew that I wouldn’t trade my current reality with my younger, imagined one, but the Ghost of Esther Past lurked around me.
And then we walked on campus. It’s a beautiful campus and, despite new buildings and updated venues, it was the same. It smelled the same. It sounded the same. I took the girls to the chapel where three times a week the entire student body gathers. On that day, the guest speaker was Lisa Beamer, the widow of the national 9/11 hero, Todd Beamer. It was my 20th reunion, but her 25th. She chose to speak about the juxtaposition of hard things happening in life that seem senseless and out of control, with the gifts and wonder of life that are surely part of a perfect plan.
She said the space between the two is where faith must reside, where the inconsistencies and questions, along with hope and peace, could co-exist safely.
Obviously my story was nothing like hers. I hadn’t been part of a national tragedy in a personal, yet public, way. But her point was true for all 2,000 of us sitting there. We all had one idea of how our lives would turn out, but the reality would often be vastly different, sometimes worse, sometimes better. How we handled that difference, and where we placed our hope during those times, would define how we faced our lives.
Armed with that perspective, we had a wonderful reunion. I showed our girls the campus, introduced them to former professors, and toured around the old TV studio and the Biblical Archeology Department. But I also paused to get them a snack when they were hungry, or hand them their new college sweatshirts when it got chilly, and quickly read the signs when they were growing bored. I chatted with old friends about theology trends, and handed out tissues to runny noses.
And I realized for myself what those “old” moms knew all those years ago, that life can take some crazy twists and turns, but it is also full of hope beyond what you could have dreamed. And sometimes returning is the best way to see precisely where you have arrived.