Mackenzie Norman

I waited for college my whole life. I’m sure you’ve felt that way before too, but let me emphasize- when I say I waited for college my whole life, I mean it.

My dad was a campus minister with the Baptist Collegiate Ministries (BCM) at a public university and while I was in the womb I was attending college events. I grew up around college students almost 24/7 and I wanted to be a college student more than anything else in the world. So when I started college, I was literally living the dream.

I decided to join the BCM at my college and things were going well. I loved being there. I was accustomed to the atmosphere, had a general idea of how things happened and where to get involved. But about mid-way through the semester I hit a wall when I realized that I wasn’t special.

I came from an understanding of BCM where I was “The Campus Minister’s Kid.” Everyone knew me. They knew that I understood the behind the scenes workings of the BCM on a totally different level. I was someone, and I was someone important. My idea of BCM and my expectations of it were tied to my identity within it. I had never experienced BCM without being the campus minister’s kid. And now, I was living BCM as a college student with no particular identity and no greater understanding of BCM. I was just a student, and it took me most of my first semester of college to realize that.

I knew that I would be someone different in college, that my role and my identity would change. But here’s the funny thing: you never really know what you find your identity in until that thing is gone. “Campus Minister’s Kid” would not have been the first thing I said about myself if someone asked me who I was. It wasn’t until I couldn’t lean on it anymore that I realized just how much of my identity I had put in that title.

You’re on your own now. You have the freedom to cast yourself in a different light. To be what you weren’t before. And maybe for the first time in your life, you’re feeling the rush of power that comes when you know you can mold your public persona like clay. You can crush the awkward pictures from middle school, leave behind the rampant gossip from high school, and emerge on the college campus a new person.

But I don’t want you to be unaware of the fact that most of you are in for a total dismantling of who you are, a stripping away of the identities you don’t even know you have. I wish someone had cued me in. Because for three years, I tried to “be someone,” especially in BCM, because it was what I knew. It shouldn’t have taken me three years to give up finding my identity in my involvement in a Christian organization, but it did. And that continuous striving cost time, energy, relationships, peace, and joy.

I don’t want that for you.

I want you to get this now, at the beginning of your freshman year. To anticipate that you will have to let go of your idea of who you are, and your idea of who you want to be in order to grab a hold of who God says you are and who He’s called you to be.

Because you will never be who God wants you to be while you are still holding on to who you want to be.

College teaches you the spiritual art of holding your life with open hands. Because it’s not your life. As a person who has been bought with the blood of Jesus, you are not your own anymore. You have been adopted into the family of God, you are called His child. In Galatians 2:20-21 Paul writes, “I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me. And the life that I now life in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself up for me.” Memorize those verses.

God’s plans for you are infinitely better than any you could imagine for yourself. And even though crucifixion doesn’t seem like a good thing, there’s a reason we call the day Jesus died “Good Friday.” Because God took what the enemy meant for evil and turned it for good. Dying to yourself is painful. But just like a seed has to die to produce a flower, so we must die to ourselves and our idea of who we are in order to see the life of Jesus lived in us– displayed beautifully in us.

The only identity that will last is an identity firmly established on Him. It’s why the man who built his house on the Rock withstood the storm. College will be a storm against your identity. And only an identity built on the Rock will withstand it.