Well, my friends, I’ve slowly but surely been packing up my apartment for my impending move to complete and total independence. As of this weekend, I’ll finally be living on my own. Perhaps we never fully and completely grow into “adulthood,” at least not until we wake up one day with 2.5 kids and a dog nipping at our heels. But I do see my apartment as a benchmark of sorts in my emergence to the adult world.

Of course, I’m not the only person who has been on the move of late. Many of you are just beginning to head back to school for another year of jolly good fun. The experience, of course, gets less traumatic as the years pass. Your first year is a bundle of nervous excitement, your second a groan of familiarity (unless you happened to have a really boring summer, in which case you’re relieved to be done with it). The third and fourth years, if you left your college town at all, are old hat. By that time, you’re a moving expert. And even Mom doesn’t cry as hard or as long when she pulls out of the parking lot. Thank God for small blessings.

One of my co-workers just dropped her son off for his first year at college here in Kentucky. She came over beforehand to ask me what not to do when moving him in (I replied that parents should never try to take over—let us call the shots when it comes to arranging the room), so this morning I asked her how it had gone. A fairly lengthy conversation ensued, which ended with, “Someday you’ll know how your mother felt—what goes around comes around.”

This weekend I also ran into our neighbor’s kid hauling his stereo out of the apartment. I’ve never really talked to him before, but this time I asked if his family was moving out. He told me that he was going to college for his first year, in that shy but excited way that eighteen year olds describe moving away from home for the first time.

And yesterday my sister, who will begin community college next month, also started a new job at the grocery store. She told me how kind everyone had been to her, how much better it was than her old job. With a bit of fear and triumph mingled in her voice, Rachel went on to describe her successful first try at ringing someone out at the cash register.

In NNPCW, we talk a lot about the particularities of our experience—the things that make us different from one another, things that we lift up in order to be our authentic selves. Yet it doesn’t hurt to remember that even through those, we humans share a lot. Regardless of age, gender, race, sexuality, or any of the other differences we talk about all the time, we all feel that mixture of excitement, trepidation, grief, and love that comes with any new direction we take in life.

So here’s a prayer for all of us facing the new in the upcoming weeks:

“May God grant you your heart’s desire,
and fulfill all your plans.
May we shout for joy over your victory,
and in the name of our God set up our banners.
May the Lord fulfill all your petitions.” --Psalm 20:4-5

Kelsey