For When You Want a Do-Over

If I could have a do-over for one season of my life, it would be college. Fear ruled my choices during those years, and as a result, I chucked a number of long-cherished dreams into the wastebasket. Perhaps this is why, when some young person in my life poo-poohs the value of the whole college experience (which is so much more than getting a degree, you understand), or drops out of high school, or flunks out in the middle of their junior year of college, or does something equally wasteful, my entire being wants to take that child by the shoulders and give them a hearty shake. Until they can hear their teeth rattling.

I went to college, I just didn’t do it the way I’d planned. And ultimately, there is no one to blame but me. I just wish I’d had some older, wiser person for whom I had deep and profound respect to give me a hearty shake back then. Someone I would have really listened to. (Parents notwithstanding. My mom tried, but parental shakes don’t tend to effectively influence young people. The natural rebellion thing and all that, you know.)

Sadly, in this life there are few do-overs. Certainly not in terms of life seasons.

I remember when the college brochures started to arrive in the mail. They were all shiny and colorful, with photographs of pretty campus scenes in fall or spring–colorful trees or gardens of flowers. Slowly, as the weeks passed, they stacked up on my desk. I spent the wee hours of the weekend paging through them over and over.

I wanted to go east. Bennington College in Vermont or Columbia in New York City. Maybe NYU. I wasn’t Ivy League material, thanks to pitiful math grades, but I wanted to major in literature and writing, so I figured there would be a way to get where I wanted to be. I also wanted to study abroad at some point, preferably at Oxford or Cambridge. And then, after I received my illustrious East Coast college degree in the literary arts, I would move to New York and work as a humble, underpaid writer at some magazine. On Saturdays, I’d work on my first novel.

I didn’t do any of it. I didn’t every try. I didn’t fill out even a single out-of-state college application.

Why not? Because ultimately, I was afraid of failing. Afraid of losing what I had. Losing my comfort zone, my friends, my boyfriend. If I left all of that behind, my subconscious whispered, I might end up with nothing–and what if I failed to find a new comfort zone, new friends, a new boyfriend where I was headed?

So I stayed where I was. I went to college five miles from the house I grew up in. I kept my friends and my boyfriend. All because of fear. But then, the fears you have in your teen years are not the same kinds of fears you have at forty. Those fears I had at seventeen seem very small to me now, but they were mammoth back then.

I’d like a do-over, even today. It’s not that I’m discontented, or that I don’t love my life. I wouldn’t trade my husband and my daughters for anything. I wouldn’t choose to be anywhere else. But I cheated myself out of some dreams, simply because I was afraid.

Did God have a different plan for me than I did? Is that why I didn’t go to college on the East Coast, why I didn’t become a writer living in a cramped one-room flat in New York? I don’t believe so. That was all me. God allows us free will, and I did what I did with mine. We all do.

[Tweet “God doesn’t give us do-overs, but he does give us fresh starts.”] God can redeem our choices, the sinful as well as the foolish, and help us find our way again. He can help us live fearless. He can lead us toward new dreams. He wants to speak into our lives if we’ll listen.

Jeremiah 29:11 unpacks God’s promise to the children of Israel when they were in exile, which we can claim in Jesus: “‘For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.'”

It’s never too late to start following the Lord. When I finally laid down my life and said, “Show me, Lord,” things began to fall into place. Fear was replaced by confidence, excitement, and anticipation. Each day became an adventure. It still is.

I didn’t live out my college dreams, but I’m living out even bigger dreams today. What about you?