The Story of My Life :P

College

I'm still having trouble wrapping my head around this one.

Earlier this week I visited my college for the first time ever. It's a beautiful campus on a sloping hillside leading down to cliffs that overlook the beach, and there are gorgeous sunsets and surfer dudes and yada yada yada.

That's all great, but it's still pretty normal. The abnormal part came after the stressful appointment with a cheerful financial aid advisor.

So I was wandering around campus with my mother and her best friend, Kimber, checking everything out. Of course, being a lover of literature, I went straight for the library, which is the most important part. 

On the second story of the library were offices, not books, and I was slightly disappointed until I saw that an old friend worked on that floor. Me, my mom, and Kimber stayed on that floor for a while, hoping he would finish the call he was making so we could say hi. But it looked like it would be awhile, so I went exploring in the offices.

Only one of them caught my attention. It had fancy seats and dark wood-paneled walls with lovely, warm paintings on them. My mother encouraged me to go inside, and I did, not really expecting anything spectacular.  There was one woman sitting at the only desk in the room, clicking away on her computer while she listened to music. I tried to tell her I was just looking around the campus, but we ended up having a conversation instead. 

At the end of the conversation, she gave me a job as her assistant. She handed me the paperwork to have filled out on the first day of school. We hugged and parted ways, and I nearly lost my mind, I was so excited. Now I would be able to take care of some of the debt I was collecting at such an expensive university.

We wandered around campus some more, my mom and Kimber thoroughly excited by the productivity of the trip.

Eventually we stumbled in to the music hall. I hadn't signed up for choir--I'd been so busy trying to find a job and finish up high school that I'd missed the auditions, and besides, I'm being put in a program where I won't be able to fit the regular choir into my schedule anyway. 

But the music hall had the same feel as the office had, where I just knew that I'd be spending a good deal of time there. I separated from my mother, who wanted to talk to a guy with dreadlocks, and went exploring there on my own. I found a stuffed animal dog positioned at an ivy-covered piano as if he were playing at the base of the stairwell and just knew that the people here were my kind of people.

After a minute or so, I went and found my mother, who had been talking with a tall, blond woman. I had no idea where dreadlocks guy went, or Kimber, for that matter. But I stayed and talked with the woman. She checked my schedule to see if choir would fit, but didn't give me a yes or no, because just then a man walked in. He wore purplish-blue spectacles. He told me he thought that his glasses were ridiculous, and introduced himself as the head of the music department. We got to discussing choir; I told them how I was president of my choir during my senior year, how my old director is a former member of the LAMC and is currently President of High School Choral Music in Southern California, and how I just had to sing. It's a part of me, and I didn't care if I was in the lowest level choir, I just needed to sing.

The head of the music department, Dr. Jackson, asked me if I had a minute to sing for him.

Of course I said yes.

We went into a rehearsal room and he led me through an impromptu audition. At the end of it, he said that the intermediate choir didn't fit in my schedule. So he gave me a spot in the top choir on campus instead. I watched him enter my name onto his roster. He gave me CDs that the choir had made in past years to listen to and his cell phone number, in case I had any questions.

It felt like something out of a movie. I'd daydreamed about something like that happening to me my whole life--and it just happened. Right when I least expected it.

We parted ways, and I found a relatively quiet place to call my best friend, Adena.

Halfway through explaining everything, I burst into tears of joy. But it was bittersweet. I'd been singing with her for so long, it felt wrong that she wouldn't be in choir with me anymore.

But hey. I count my blessings.

I'm a follower of Christ and a friend of God, and I realize that none of this, the job or the spot in choir, would have happened if it were not His will. I had more than a meeting with a financial advisor that day: I had a divine appointment.