Kansas is love, Manhattan is love, Theta is love, community is love, and my friends are love
Four years ago, when I came to the little college town of Manhattan, Kansas, I was broken. I had friends and family members who had passed away recently and I just went through the hardest breakup since I had started dating. These events left me in a really dark place, they left me not wanting anything to do with love. I adopted the mantra that “love is pointless because people either hurt you, leave you, or they die”. And once I entered into the college atmosphere, I was leaving God behind. The start of my journey didn’t help the hard shell around my heart, it made it grow.
After leaving Texas from living there my entire life and all the other challenges I faced, my parents then moved to Canada and I had three family friends pass away within two weeks. The hardness and the brokenness grew.
I could go into more detail of my deep spiral of shame, guilt, and things that resulted in that but I want to focus on just how amazed I am by God…
My beautiful Father took a place I didn’t even know really existed until five years ago and turned it into one of the most meaningful places in my life thus far. He used sorority sisters to show me His love and care during my sophomore year, my year of transitioning back to my faith.
Within the last week I was able to see them all and I was reminded of just how much they each impacted my life with God’s love and how, through loving me, they expressed God’s love in my life in a way that enticed me and drew me back to Him. The areas where I tried to push God out, He slowly was creeping back in by using love to break away the hardness around my heart.
But the brokenness didn’t go away after only one year. I was still pushing people away who tried to love me and care for me. I could give love and kindness but I could never receive it. I didn’t like love and I didn’t want to have anything to do with it. Because, to me, by giving people the ability to love me, I was also giving them the ability to hurt me.
After bouncing around from college ministry to college ministry, I felt a push to reach out to someone who I didn’t really have a connection with besides just being in my sorority. Fast forward a year and she is discipling me! I joined the ministry that she was apart of and that became my community for the last year and a half I was in Manhattan. Through that ministry I was introduced to some of my closest friends. They have showed me God in ways that I didn’t think possible. And continued to teach me about love and what it truly looks like when being lived out by the Holy Spirit.
Looking back on the last four years I just see God. I see how He took people I never thought I would meet, organizations I never thought of being apart of, a town I didn’t even really know existed, and used it all to bring me closer to Him… That just blows my mind. He taught me new things about Him and about the people He loved, He broke down the hardshell around my heart, and He drew me closer to Him. For my entire life I’ve see God as this master conductor, this conductor and composer of life, and He just played out a huge crescendo of love by bringing me to Manhattan. He amazes me everyday.
I just had to say goodbye to people who had become family to me. My sorority was my home away from home and those people showed me love and acceptance, and took me in as their sister. My community was full of people who cared for me more than I ever thought I deserved. This weekend was just the first wave of goodbyes I will have to do and it’s the hardest. Because unlike my friends here at home, I don’t know when I will see my friends in Manhattan again. Once I get back and everyone starts their life after college, you never know where people will be or when you will see them. One of the amazing friends I made during my time here reminded me that no goodbye is really forever because we will all be together in our true Home one day, in Heaven.
God knew all of this before I ever even considered applying to Kansas State… How incredible is that? I have been so blessed and honored to have known and met the people I have. I am continually praising and thanking God for the people I have met and the love he has showed me through them.
Manhattan was just a place and now it’s somewhere that I associate with a deep amount of love and many amazing memories.
I came to Manhattan broken and because of a loving, amazing, mysterious, beautiful story-teller God, I have left healed. And He has taken my brokenness, turned it into a beautiful story of love and redeeming grace, and will use it to further His kingdom on the race.
Here are some pictures of just a few of those people, there are still so many more…
