Hey guys, please read over my essay and comment on it. Does it show its impact on me enough?
Evaluate a significant exp, and its impact on you
In movies, that bustling-city girl, with the top-tier job and grand aspirations, meets a small town boy and realizes that what truly matters in life is true love and not big bucks. Similarly but without the romantic drama, I saw what I would give up as I moved on to top-tier colleges and bigger goals.
In junior year I was surrounded by high school seniors, who endlessly recounted memories of wild times in high school and boasted famous plans for the future. I quickly joined the mania of college dreams, aiming for high grades and extracurricular achievements in preparation for university. But unlike others, I could not also let go of the past. As I reminisced on my fun adventures in past three years, the fact that I would soon have to move away from home cut me in the heart. Behind closed doors, I frequently loathed with tears the fact that life forced me to grow older, that the simplistic fun of past times would be shut behind the pad-locked door of time. At least, I thought, there was one group that never changed: my church youth group, full of friends who stayed with me since childhood.
In the summer after junior year, I went with that group to Big Bear for Youth Retreat. With three seniors celebrating their graduations with us, being there forced me realize that I was also about to move on for good, while this group I left behind would continue without me. The new youths, my newer friends, were filling the places of out-going seniors. I looked around at my friends' faces, but no one was lamenting or resenting this fact; they were all having the time of their lives. Being with them help me answer the question that kept pressing me.
During that trip, we studied the Parable of the Lost Son, and I learned that I was like the two sons in that Bible story. Like the younger prodigal son, who ran loose with his inheritance and squandered it, I had desperately been trying to recreate and relive the childlike, "frivolous" fun I had had in the past. Like the son who felt unfairly treated because his errant brother was warmly welcomed back, I envied the blooming and intimate fellowship the newest youths were just beginning to experience, because it was a blessing I also had.
But just as the younger son soon came to his senses and the older son was corrected in his thinking, so I realized that these feelings were not abnormal. They meant I was ready to move on to different things, responsibilities that require more maturity. I knew our senior friends were not extricating themselves from us by leaving. Even after I, myself, graduated and met new people, to each other we would still be what we always were: brothers and sisters in Christ. In college I would be able to mature further, until again life changed and I would take on a job of greater responsibility. But right now, it is important to move forward, to understand that childhood reflects the past well done -yes, completed - and the future should be done just as well if not better. I know the past has helped ready me for the new paths of life to come.
