His Love.

I thought, for the longest time after college, that I was never going to find community the same way I found it in the four years at Berkeley. When I left for Sacramento, I didn’t realize how hard it would be to find those sweet moments of sitting on a carpeted floor and pouring out our lives while laughing and somberly head-nodding. After checking out multiple churches and small groups and bible studies I never found anything that was even a fraction of what I had in Northhouse. 

Then I came to New York. And the first year was the second hardest and darkest year of my life. I cried almost every day, and struggled even more deeply with loneliness. I missed everyone back home. (And I still do). I found myself committing to a church, trying to go to small group as often as I could, wishing, hoping, demanding that I find community here. Searching and searching and searching and coming up empty-handed. 

And then this semester, one of my closest friends here suggested doing a bible study with our other friend. Just the three of us. No shared church. No agenda. No lights, no music, no food. Just us, sitting crosslegged on the carpeted floor of her room, the yellow light adding a warm glow, our bibles open face up on the ground before us. 

No facade about trying to act like a good Christian, no “perfect bible study answers”, no preaching, no ranting, just...this pure, child-like hunger for the Word. We’ve only met three times so far but each time, I enter the room exhausted from the week and I leave refreshed, as if I had drank a full glass of cold water and ate a hearty chunk of multi-grain bread. 

And it hit me: this was God’s answer to the prayer I prayed in Sacramento, three years ago. 

I realize now that nothing will ever be the same as Northhouse. There’s a taste of naïveté, and drama and passion that college exudes, something post-grad life can never recreate. But this bible study has a similar sort of feeling - a bit more mature, sure, but still the same “full” feeling.