Good Like a Medicine

It was so great to spend a weekend with my college roommate, Miranda, and her current roommate Tabetha. They are finishing their last few months of medical school and anticipating Match Day and the beginning of their new medical careers. Exciting! They came to visit us for a few days, and we had a blast. It was so good to see Miranda’s smile again and to sit on “our couch” together and eat ice cream, just like old times. Miranda is looking forward to becoming a pediatrician, and Tabetha desires to take her career skills as a surgeon on the foreign mission field someday.

I really enjoyed hearing their stories about the last few years and hearing them discuss dreams of the future. After they drove away (and after I took a little nap with the kids), I was thinking about how amazing it is that Miranda and I shared a dorm room in college just five years ago . . . and now our lives look so strikingly different than they did at the time. She is on the threshold of being a doctor, and I have a husband and three children. We used to watch movies, go to church and parties, share the same bathroom, and be silly college girls (more me than her, probably!) together. Now our lives are on very different paths (except I guess we’ll both be looking at baby body parts for the next several years - ha!) - And yet we see in these paths how God has been so faithful to both of us in various ways. God has brought us each through times of emotional pressure, intense education, and growth in our faith and trust in Him. I am so thankful for these things. Ultimately God has given us more of Jesus - and that is what matters most. I think sometimes we look around at our peers or people we meet and think, “I don’t have much to say - our lives are so different.” Yes, we may be on different roads, but if we are Christians, we have so much in common - the main thing being the faithfulness of God in Jesus. We can sit and talk together about the many ways God has proved faithful to us. This can bring us closer together in our relationships than ever before, and we can share the joys of the sojourner’s journey. This is a really great dynamic about Christian relationships. It’s neat to think about how Miranda and I may be able to sit on a couch (hopefully a different one!) sometime in the distant future and ponder a million+ ways God has been more and more faithful in our lives!

Well, Lydia and Steven were particularly sad to see them go. They had so much fun and warmed up to Miranda and Tabetha in no time. I asked Steven if he was sad to see them go “bye bye,” and of course, what did he say, Miranda? (hahaha!)