Congratulations!  You’re graduating from college after four or more years of disciplined growth.  With your Bachelor’s degree in hand, you feel as if you could go anywhere, do anything, and become anyone that you want to be.  The vast array of opportunities and options awaiting you post-college is exhilarating, but as a fellow pilgrim who struggled on the choppy seas of transition, may I offer you a few guideposts for your journey?

A few months ago I ran into a girl I knew from high school.  We were both standing in the check-out lines at the craft store and I spied her across the counter.  I hoped she wouldn’t recognize me.  I didn’t want to justify what I’d done in the past seven years since graduating—those crucial years in which you’re somehow supposed to morph from an insecure adolescent into a confident adult with a resume full of occupational successes.

“Have you and your groom decided on the reception hall?”  “What are your colors?”  “Will you be renting the limousine or the horse and carriage?”  Questions were showered upon me like haphazardly-slung packets of rice, flyers were thrust into my already-full hands, and after sampling everything from raspberries and cream to champagne truffle, I left on a cake-induced sugar-high.

I’ve attend church services weekly for twenty-four years, but I can count on one hand the number of times that I’ve cried during the service—the simple tears of a quiet girl tasting the palpable presence of God.

I’ve found that genuine community develops in the most unlikely places, and that when it shows up, it’s an unexpected gift to be treasured. Sort of like when you’re briskly walking down the sidewalk, and there, defiantly pushing through a crack in the downtown concrete, is a nondescript yellow flower. You don’t know where it came from or how it managed to survive its hostile climate, but all the same its small offering of beauty makes you smile.

I feel overwhelmed, small, and inconsequential when it comes to the issue of justice for the oppressed. 

All right—I confess. I’m a member of the enigmatic twentysomethings. Technically defined as a “young adult in their 20s,” it’s more accurate to describe a twentysomething as a person seeking to establish his or her identity as an individual of worth and significance.