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Saturday, June 18, 2016

7 Years

A 7-year chapter of my life has come to a close. I have moved out of Isla Vista, a place that I called home for 7 years. I have been very emotional through this experience, and I am not sure how to react. Walking through the tired, worn-down, empty Isla Vista has had its effect on me. I have lived for my entire adult live in IV, and everything that I have done as an adult, the decisions that I have made, have been in IV. IV has shaped me and as I leave it, I feel that I am leaving a part of me with it. I think that I remember the relationships that I developed, many of which have since faded, and the experiences that those relationships wrought. It is intimidating, harrowing even, to face a new, extremely unknown chapter of my life, and yet it is necessary now. I cannot stay in IV any longer; I stretched it and wrung all of the juice out of it, and now I move on. But how? IV is covered with ghosts of my past and people that I once loved. I have prayed countless words over IV, cried so many tears, laughed uncontrollably, wanted to run and hide, learned to cook, got my driver's license, saw multiple generations of students pass through, felt the deepest emotion and the entire spectrum of emotion, felt no emotion, experienced bleak loneliness, experienced the utter joy of being alone, felt deeply loved, felt deeply neglected, grew out my beard for the first time, changed my haircut for the first time, got my first real job, got a college diploma, baked wedding cakes, walked every square inch of UCSB and IV, felt heartbreak, tragedy, and loss, baptized people, mentored people, discipled people, felt the depths of failure, learned who I am so much more, developed who I am so much more, gained friends and family, lost friends and family. And through all of this, IV was there, like a constant friend.

It is hard to leave, but, like I said, necessary. The greatest thing that I take away (and there are many) is that I can wade through this next chapter of my life confidently. Going in I had no idea what to make of college, and even less idea how to traverse life after, and yet the gentle guiding hand of God was with me, leading me through the high grasses. And now here I am, examining my past, trying to make sense of who I am. Isla Vista will always be a part of me, and not because I spent four years partying and I love to party, but because I spent 7 years maturing and becoming man, growing and changing with the businesses and streets around me. That seemed to be the constant in my life those seven years: God and change. I am scared now as I experience emotions and thoughts that I have not in many years, but I am confident as well, loved deeply by an infinite creator God whom I know in very different ways than when I first met Him. But I think that Isla Vista for me will always have a place in my heart because it is the place where I first got to know that God well. Just as so many relationships in my life now, I cultivated the relationship that I have with God through long walks in IV, through seeking throughout the streets, through doing life with Him. IV enabled me to do that uniquely in a way that no other place has. I feel it. There is an emotion that I feel at times, and it would not be inappropriate for me to call that emotion 'Isla Vista.' In many ways it is a conglomeration of 7 years worth of experiences crammed into one little lightning bolt that hits my heart from time to time and leaves me as quickly as it came.

In what has become one of my favorite books of all time, C. S. Lewis (who has become one of my favorite authors of all time) writes this about joy: "[Joy] must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and Pleasure. Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again … I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world. But then Joy is never in our power and Pleasure often is.” When I think of Isla Vista and the seven years that I lived there (and honestly, if I allowed myself to properly simmer in the thoughts of that place, I could easily be taken captive and wind up writing an entire book. There are far too many places and feelings associated with that chapter of my life to be able to condense or list them all) I think of joy. I think that IV may be the place that I first experienced the type of joy that Lewis talks about (and if you, reader, would like a better understanding of the joy that I am talking about, read Surprised by Joy) outside of an experience that I link it to from my childhood, and I have experienced it too many times to remember in Isla Vista. The fact is, Joy like this is not necessarily pleasurable, that is the point. I do not feel pleasure at leaving IV, I feel sadness, regret, missed opportunity, and a touch of loneliness. Yet, I cannot connote these feelings as negative; they are deeply positive and thus I declare them joy. For it is in leaving IV that I see the effect that this place had in making me who I am and of using what was already there, taking the raw materials that this boy came in with, and shaping them into a man.

And now I step boldly into uncharted waters. I will react to these waters as much as they are reacting to me, just as Isla Vista has reacted to me. I mourn for it, and it mourns for me. And yet, ultimately one of the reasons that I know that it is time for me to leave is because I have felt a feeling of completeness. I feel that I have done what was set before me to do there. I have impacted so many lives, and that is what makes it so hard to leave. And yet, it is time. This feeling of completeness accompanies a feeling of wishing that I could be back in the thick of it-4 or so years in, loving Isla Vista and the people there because I knew my purpose there so well. And yet that purpose is done, and I am thankful that it is so. I know longer could do the same things that I did there. All things are being made new, and I am content with what I have done there.

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