Words of Warriors The Best Four Years of Your Life?

College is the best four years of your life...right?

Coming into my first year, I remember arriving full of a giddy delight in all things college: new friends, a new city, and a long-awaited new sense of independence and adventure. I was really going to have the best four years of my life. And I still believe these four years are wonderful and important: a sweet season of life.

But even at a place like Westmont, life can still be hard. Maybe this year you have been overwhelmed with classes, never having had to put in effort for an A (or even a C) before.

Maybe it's the independence. It’s your first time living away from home (in the midst of a pandemic!) and you’re living with people who are not your siblings. You might be homesick, especially after eating your 15th slice of pizza from the DC this week.

Or maybe it's friendships. Most of us go into college expecting to make our lifelong best friends, so we start frantically searching for them the second week of school, trying to find our group quickly so we don’t end up alone. You are surrounded by more community than ever before, yet maybe you feel even more isolated.

So let’s be honest: college is hard! We forget sometimes, and maybe we even feel ashamed for not having the perfect four years. After the novelty of Camp Westmont wears off—usually sometime around mid-October—what do we do?

We embrace life to the full at college, both hard and good. Let’s hold the joys and challenges of this season in tension. In the words of my favorite author, Shauna Niequist, let’s embrace a life in which we are “Present Over Perfect.” When we do this, college is still both hard and wonderful—but that’s part of what can make it some of the best years of our lives.