The College Girl's Survival Guide

It’s one of the most dangerous statements spoken by well-meaning adults, and you’ve probably heard it a dozen times: “College is the best four years of your life.”

Well, it’s only Chapter One, and we’re just getting to know each other, but I’m going to tell you like it is. No sugarcoating. College should not be the best four years of your life. If college is the best four years this life has to offer, that means that by age twenty-two you’ve already lived the best season you’ll ever live. To be frank, that is just plain depressing. You graduate from college and it’s all downhill from there? Let’s hope for all of our sakes that college isn’t the best four years of life!

Even more importantly, the idea that the best four years of your life are in college sets us up with extremely unrealistic expectations. It creates the illusion that college is all good times and great vibes. It sets us up to be shocked when we hit bumpy parts of the road. Instead of anticipating that college will be full of challenges, we are surprised and usually horrified when those challenges come our way. While college is an incredible four-year ride (or maybe five if you enjoy a good victory lap) that grows us in many positive ways—new experiences, relationships, knowledge, and more—a lot of the growth God has in store will come about through really challenging and difficult situations.

There are two elements to understanding and overcoming challenges that I want to make sure you grasp. First, I want to explain the deeper reason why we are so shocked when we experience challenges throughout the college journey. When I came to understand why this is, it changed my perspective and expectations for the rest of my life. Not exaggerating.

I’m sure you’ve experienced times of transition before. Maybe you and your family moved once or several times while you were growing up. Maybe you’ve experienced a change in your family situation—a divorce, a grandparent moving in, siblings moving out, or the death of a loved one. All kinds of change happen prior to college that we deal with and grow accustomed to. It’s not like you’ve never experienced change that brings challenges before.

However, the key is that those changes happened to you. You didn’t choose those changes. They happened to you, and then you were forced to adapt. Then there’s college. Going to college is a choice you make that brings about huge change in your life, and because you make an intentional choice to bring on that change, you have very different expectations of how that change will look. When we choose change, we falsely expect that it will be all puppies, butterflies, and rainbows. Because we feel a false sense of control, we expect the change we’ve chosen to be glamorous, exciting, wonderful, and lovely. You had the amazing privilege of choosing to go to college. That choice has led you to expect that your life will look a certain way, probably like “the best four years of your life”!

Yet the dirty truth is that new experiences—whether you’re thrown into them by choice or not—bring about a number of challenges. This is why, though you’ve chosen your dream school, you start getting that knot in your stomach as move-in day approaches. You are suddenly anxious, stressed, or even fearful of leaving your high school friends. Maybe you are fighting with your parents so often you forget what it was like to get along. Or you may rush off to college without a worry in the world, but then two weeks into the first semester, you’re so homesick that you’re already thinking about transferring to the school in your hometown. Or maybe you immediately hate your roommate. Or—worse—you chose to live with your best friend from high school, and now you can’t stand the sight of each other. The list of unexpected challenges goes on and on.

Before you start calling me Negative Nancy, hear me out. College is an amazing time! It will most likely be some of the most formative years of your adult life. You will decide who you are, what you believe in, and what you want to do with it all. Yet each semester, from the end of high school to your first year out of college, will be marked with challenges and situations that you’ll have to decide how to respond to and transition through.

So don’t be surprised by the challenges or the hard seasons of college life. If you don’t expect challenges in this life, you will be knocked to the ground over and over—beaten up and bruised by all of life’s unexpected hurdles. Instead, if you anticipate challenges, you’ll be standing firm, ready to tackle them head-on with good sense, grace, and faith when they come (and they will come).

Think of it this way: You and I are on a beach vacation. We swim out just a little way from the shore, just enough so that we can no longer touch the bottom of the ocean. We are floating along, soaking up the sun without a care in the world, when suddenly a giant wave crashes down on us and we fight for our lives to get back up to the surface to take a breath. But after what seems like much longer than a few seconds, we find ourselves bobbing above the ocean water. We cough, catch our breath, and settle back into our floats. We’re relaxing, sunning, laughing—but it happens again! Another wave knocks us down. Over and over, we struggle to survive from wave after wave, never learning to anticipate the next one. That’s what life is like when we never expect hardship to come our way.

But maybe it’s better if you and I swim out from the shore, relax, and soak up the sun, while still knowing that waves are going to hit us from time to time. We don’t fret about the waves. We don’t focus on when the next wave is going to come. We float along and enjoy ourselves, but when the wave comes we’re not caught off guard. We choose to duck down under the water and wait for the wave to pass, or we gear up for the wave and use it as an adventurous ride back to the shoreline.

Just like we don’t need to fret about and focus on the next wave when we’re at the beach, we shouldn’t spend our lives worried about which hardship might come next. However, as long as we keep in mind that challenges are going to come our way, we won’t have to drown in hardship and we will be able to recover much faster!

The second element to understanding and overcoming challenges is this: You must learn to embrace the enhanced personal and spiritual growth you’ll gain during seasons of hardship versus seasons of contentment. I believe God uses life’s challenges and difficulties to grow us immeasurably more than He uses life’s successes and easy times.

When we look in the Bible, over and over again we find stories of men and women whom God uses in extraordinary ways, and all of them go through terribly difficult seasons and challenges in life.

In Genesis, we read an incredibly complex story about a man named Abram, whom God later renames Abraham. God spoke to Abram, telling him to leave his country, his family, and all that he knew, but God also promised to bless Abram, make his name famous, and make a great nation from his line, and ultimately, God promised that every family on the earth (even yours and mine) would be blessed because of Abraham. While that seems like a pretty incredible reward, Abraham had to endure many hardships beyond the first call to leave behind all that he knew. As if leaving home and traveling to a foreign country, without any other details of the plan, besides God’s ultimate promise, wasn’t difficult enough! Abraham suffered through a famine, having his wife (temporarily) taken by Pharaoh, and decades of infertility (you know he was thinking, So where is this great nation coming from again?). And then once God finally blessed him with a child, God told Abraham he had to sacrifice him—literally kill him—which, of course, was a trial of faith. God was never going to have Abraham kill his only son, but can you imagine the agony Abraham faced while he prepared to do what he thought God was asking him to do? Abraham’s hardships didn’t stop there. Yet God used every single one of those difficult situations—sometimes brought on by God, other times brought on by Abraham’s bad decisions—to grow Abraham into a more godly and righteous man. Today, you and I are blessed because of Abraham, because from his son, Isaac, God grew His chosen nation, Israel, which birthed our Savior, Jesus. (See Genesis 12–25.) In the same way, you and I can be assured that God will use all of the hardships in our lives for our good. He uses them to teach us, correct us, shape us, and strengthen us, ultimately molding us into the women He designed us to be.

There’s another guy in Genesis, who happens to be Abraham’s great-grandson, who also experienced immense hardship over and over and over, even though God promised to use him in a mighty way. Joseph knew from an early age that he would someday be a leader of God’s people; in fact, God told him that through two specific dreams. But before Joseph could become that leader, his brothers betrayed him and sold him into slavery. This was after his oldest brother convinced his other brothers not to murder him! Talk about a rough day with the siblings. So instead of dealing with the mess of killing, Joseph’s brothers decided they would make some money off of him by selling him into slavery. Over the years as a slave in Egypt, Joseph found favor in the sight of his master and worked his way up to the top of the household hierarchy. But then his master’s wife attempted to seduce him, and when Joseph refused out of respect for God and his master, she cried, “Sexual assault!” which had Joseph thrown into prison. Can you imagine? Do you wonder if Joseph doubted the dreams God had given him? Why on earth would God allow his family to betray him, or allow him to be thrown into slavery and then prison, if He was planning on elevating Joseph to a high-level leadership position? And yet God used all of those hardships to grow Joseph’s faithfulness to the Lord. He taught Joseph things along the way, through the challenges, so that when he was eventually appointed as the right hand to Pharaoh and given the authority to rule over Egypt, he would be the man God designed him to be—one who would bring salvation to his entire family! (See Genesis 37–47.)

Maybe you already have a sense of God’s greater plan for your life. You are passionate about medicine, teaching, or business and have a vision for how God might use you and the talents He’s given you. Yet, like our friend Joseph found out, you can be assured that as you travel along the road God has designed for you, there will be major bumps and even detours. However, none of that means God isn’t in control or doesn’t have a great plan for your life. It means He wants to grow you and give you experiences that will better prepare you for the days ahead.

Let me give you one more example, and this time we’ll look at a female friend. In the book of Ruth, the story begins with immense heartbreak and hardship but ends in beautiful redemption. Ruth’s family lives in a land where famine strikes, ending in the death of her husband, her brother-in-law, and her father-in-law. The story opens with three grieving women, who are likely starving as well. Ruth chooses to follow her mother-in-law to a country she has never been to before, leaving behind the home and family she’s known her whole life. (Sounds a little familiar, doesn’t it?) Widowed women were about the lowest you could get on the societal pole. They were poor and starving and had no real way of making money or providing for themselves. I can’t imagine the weight, grief, and depression Ruth and her mother-in-law, Naomi, must have felt. And yet God had a plan. Not only did God provide a new husband for Ruth—one who would be able to take care of her and Naomi—but He united Ruth and Boaz so that Ruth would become part of Jesus’ lineage. Ruth and Boaz had a baby boy named Obed. (Oh—I forgot to mention that Ruth was infertile for the ten years during her first marriage!) Obed was the grandfather of David, which is the lineage that God promised the Messiah would come from. There were immense hardships and inexplicable challenges, and yet God had a purpose and plan for Ruth’s life that took those hardships and turned them into eternal blessings.

And those are just three examples. In fact, you’d be hard-pressed to find a person in the Bible who doesn’t experience some kind of challenge or difficulty, but in each of their lives God used seasons of hardship to prepare them for the plan He had in store for them. Why would you and I be any different?

So, when challenges come our way, instead of responding with panic or angst, we can respond with a steady hand, confident that God is going to grow us through the difficult situation. Instead of praying, “Why, God?” or “Please change this circumstance, God!” we can pray, “Please change my heart, God! Grow me and equip me through this challenge. Help me to become the woman you created me to be.”

College life (and the rest of your life) will be full of challenges, conflict, hardship, and difficulties. But if you can expect them, instead of being sideswiped by them, and remember that God is using them for your good—to grow you into the woman He designed you to be—you can live a life filled with so much more joy, freedom, and hope than you ever could otherwise.