tracks in the dirt

What direction?

What direction?

What direction now?

You’ve one life

You’ve one life

One life left to lead

It was one year ago today that I decided to go to Hendrix (actually it was May 14th but it took me a while to post this...). That’s right- the school that only a few months previous I encountered at a college fair and gave only the time of day to roll my eyes and head on my way to the Harvard booth. I believe my first words on the subject of Hendrix College, addressed to my father, were, “I would rather die than live in Arkansas.” Well, things change now, don’t they?

Now if you’ll allow me the use of a single cliché, I think I’ll rewind a bit.

I grew up in Kingwood, Texas. Think a hundred thousand cloned upper-class, Caucasian, evangelical, PTA meeting attending, American flag waving, Republican members of a “development” community. We call ourselves the livable forest, glory. Kingwood really is a great place, I just like to give it a hard time. The reason I say all of this, though, is to stress that attending college right out of high school is not an option around here. I graduated with a thousand people and know of one who is not attending college. College is just what we do.

I thought the University of Texas would be nice, until I visited it. Don’t get me wrong, that’s an amazing school up there, but it only took me about ten minutes driving around campus to realize that it was most decidedly not the place for me. I couldn’t hack it as one student among fifty thousand others smack dab in the middle of Austin, Texas. After that I set my heart on Wheaton College. I feel like its name should jump off the page with illuminated lights because that was how I felt about it. It was Wheaton: a small, perfect, lovely in every way community of young people pursuing Christ together all the while receiving a liberal arts education so excellent that it would afford Wheaton to be named by many as the “Harvard of Christian colleges”. What more could a girl want, right? I thought so, until I received one of those infamous thin, little envelopes- not accepted.

Those words at the top are lyrics to a song by Switchfoot, by the way. This song, that I first heard at a concert around the time I was sending in all those applications, became my heart’s cry. I wanted to know where I would be going, what I would be doing, and how I would be paying for it. More than anything else, I knew God had a plan for me and I just wanted to make sure I followed it. What direction? What direction? What direction now?

The thing about choosing a college is that it is the first step in crushing the mantra that Kingwood children are indoctrinated with: you can be whatever you want to be. Choosing a major is the next step, because the more you narrow down your dreams in order to hone your greatest passions, the more you are forced to compromise the possibilities of pursing other passions. Let’s face it, if I get a degree in art I’m probably not going to be a doctor. And that’s okay, but it takes a developing maturity to accept.

The heaviness of such a great decision to be made started to come over me like a wet blanket that I just couldn’t get out from underneath. It was then that on a daily basis I began to receive more advice than is probably in the least bit healthy. Differing advice too, and all from well-meaning people whom I loved very much, which made it increasingly difficult to gage what my path should become.

Everyone had a different idea of what I should do and why. What I realize now, though, is that while they all wanted what was best for me, I have to be the person who makes that call. I was the only one who could figure out for myself what road God and I were going to travel down together.

If you’re reading this you probably know that I ended up at Hendrix College. Glorious, little Hendrix. The beautiful, fresh campus rests as a stark contrast against the church-littered, small town on the rise of Conway, Arkansas. The best way I know of to describe this place to you is to paint a picture of the quintessential Hendrix student. She is, above all, open minded. Unafraid to question and test everything, and I do mean everything. Of life, love, religion, truth, beauty, wisdom, everything. She is a hippie, liberal, Barack Obama-loving activist who has an amazingly huge heart for changing the world. She is constantly engaging in deep conversations. She studies hard, and then parties hard, and repeats. It’s a beautiful thing.

Now, Kingwood is not the antithesis of Hendrix, but if you subtract the Caucasian majority and upper-middle class aroma, you get pretty close. I arrived toting photos of my family and a pink bible and was greeted with the typical college stuff- lots of parties, lots of alcohol, and lots of other things I had never been exposed to before. Culture shock much? Despite being Methodist affiliated, Hendrix isn’t exactly known for making the top ten list of Focus on the Family colleges. I made that up, but you know what I mean. If not, just do a youtube search.

What I’m getting to is that Hendrix is exactly the place that the American contemporary “Christian” culture advised me to avoid. Why? Well, for one the student body is 90 plus percent democrat. Hah. Just kidding. (But only sort of.) It’s the kind of place where you can lose your innocence pretty fast. Not just socially, but also intellectually and spiritually. And no one’s going to protect you. The professors lay it all out there, they tell you what they think, and they are very persuasive. After a semester, I had not only read Plato, Darwin, Augustine, Confucius, Aristophanes, Adams, DuBois, and The Qu’ran (they aren’t exactly James Dobson but then again who is?), but I could also tell you what it looked like to trip on acid, where to go to smoke pot, what to do in case of “sexile”, and where to find the first liquor store out of the dry county (Lake Liquor, Maumelle by the way).

So…when we are asking this question—what direction?—who are we to listen to? Our parents? Our “Christian” radio stations, books, magazines, and conferences? Our hearts? Our minds? God? Why do we answer this with "God" so easily and then turn to wrestle years upon years with what that looks like? But what does listening to God really look, or sound, like? And how do we know that it is Him? And how do we know if He is speaking through one of these other mediums?

How do we know which path to travel, which path to forge?

How do we know which voices to listen to?

I can’t answer these questions. But I can tell you that I went to Hendrix, I ignored the pre-made plans for aspiring, young, Christians girls and signed up for the quirky liberal arts college in the land of Woo Pig Sooie. (ps-Go Razorbacks.) I saw things I didn’t want to see, tasted things I didn’t want to taste, and it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. My parents dropped me off with tears streaming down my face, my heart knowing not a soul for five hundred miles. My throat hurt but my heart bled.

But I stayed. It’s a year later now, and I can tell you boldly and passionately that I would not be the person I am today if it were not for the decision to nix all the plans that everyone else had for my life and go to Hendrix. I now know more fully what I believe, why I believe it, why I did not reject it, and why others choose not to believe it. I gained a lifetime of treasure this year, but the greatest jewel is that I have begun to be more of the person that God has created me to be, and less of the girl that they told me God wanted me to be.

Many have traveled this road before

I see the tracks in the dirt

Maybe I don’t agree with where they are leading

-Bethany Dillon