Moving During a Pandemic

-


Hello! Welcome back to Joyfully Walking by Faith! 

As I prepared to start a new semester and move back out of my family's home and into my new living situation I wanted to take some time to share what it was like to move out of my previous situation a few months ago and compare it to what it was like to move into my apartment. I felt like now would be an appropriate time to share this crazy story with you all. 

As I mentioned in my last post my college extended our spring break an extra week as a result of the rapidly rising amount in Covid-19 cases back in March. I also mentioned that my teachers had been transparent of their assumption that we would not return to traditional education. What I did not know is that I would not be permitted to return to my dorm if I left for the spring break. We were told that if we left we would be allowed to return. That was not the case as one week after I left I received an email that informed us that if we had left for the break we were no longer permitted to live on campus. 

This is where things got complicated. They requested that I sign up for a 45-minute time slot in which I was allowed to come to pack up my room, move all of my things down the three stories to my car, load all my belongings into my little car, and then clean and disinfect my room. Again I was told that I needed to complete everything in 45 minutes. Oh, and I was not allowed to have anyone help me. Let me tell you this was quite a daunting endeavor.  

One week after I came home for spring break my dad and I returned to school to collect my things. I, alone, walked up the three flights of stairs to my third-floor residence. I packed up all the things that were not in anyway breakable in trash bags and preseeded to toss them off of the third-floor balcony to my dad who was waiting outside the gates below. Rapunzel, Rapunzel toss down your...stuff? Yeah, it was very much not like any fairytale I've ever read. But hey I guess that's life right? I definitely broke pretty much every rule getting the process done because it was not a 45-minute task and I needed a lot of help but in the end, we were able to pull it off. We (totally just my dad) somehow, unbeknownst to me were able to cram all of the contents of my whole dorm room, minus a few items, into my small sedan. Then we made the trip back home to stick all my things into a storage unit not knowing when or if I would return to school. 

Flash forward to six months later we were thrilled to be able to open that same storage unit again and retrieve my things. We packed up my stuff, in two different cars this time, and we moved it all to my apartment at school. This moving experience was very different. To my great joy, both of my parents were able to come and not only help me move my things in but helped me get settled as well. We made the nearly four-hour drive to school and were able to move all my things in quickly and smoothly. The whole process was exciting and enjoyable as me, my roommates, and our families all buzzed around the apartment finding places for items and making it feel like home. 

While moving out was an experience filled with fear, stress, and frustration moving in this time around was full of joy, excitement, and hope for the year ahead. The pandemic has changed a lot of things in my life but I am surprisingly happy with where I am at this moment. It has taken tears, fear, and fighting to get here but I don't know that I would change any of it because I trust in what the Lord has planned for the future ahead. 

Every day may not be joyful but I can walk by faith in his plan every day. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Joyful Return

-
Image
  I started this blog when I was 19 years old, nearly five years ago as an outlet after walking through many emotional and challenging life circumstances. I had just finished my first year of college and gotten out of an unhealthy relationship, both bringing a slew of other difficulties along with them. On top of it all the world was in a state of medical and political panic as the global pandemic was at its height. I remember sitting on the back porch of my parent's house during quarantine with my beloved dog Annie, who has since passed, grappling with all the unprocessed things in my mind. I found myself opening my computer, shockingly for something other than online school, and I began writing about my life. Many of those stories, ideas, and ramblings never made it onto this blog. At the time I did not know I was writing a blog, I was just writing my stories in a digital form as a way for my mind to process the world around me. After writing about my Night to Shine experience, w...
Read more

Night to Shine 2020

-
Image
Recently I have had time to finally sit down and write about my Night to shine experience. God was completely intertwined in the whole night and it was incredible. I found Tim Tebow and the Tim Tebow Foundation back in 2014 when he started putting on an event called "Night to Shine", a Prom for people with special needs. His ministry immediately spoke directly to my heart. I am not the kind of person who has a long "bucket list" of things that I want to do but since I was 14 years old my "bucket list" consisted of one single thing. Working with the Tim Tebow Foundation. That dream was achieved on February 7, 2020. I was meant to be there and I fought to be there. When I first moved to College I had a really difficult time settling in, especially finding a home church, something that as a Pastor's Kid I had never had to do before. I began attending my new home church out of convenience and the first week that I chose to stay at my church the pastor ...
Read more

Advocate Adjust Accommodate

-
Image
Hello and Welcome to Joyfully Walking by Faith.  Have you ever felt like there was something about you that wasn't the same as everyone else? Maybe you are like me and you feel like your brain works differently than most people's brains do.  My whole academic life I have quietly struggled. I struggled to learn how to read. I struggle with reading comprehension. I struggle to spell words correctly. I struggle with math. I struggled to learn how to tell time on an analog clock. I struggle to retain information unless it is presented verbally, visually, and physically. Essentially I have an undiagnosed learning disability.  I'll start from the beginning. My mom is not only a teacher but one who has spent a large portion of her career focused on specifically teaching children how to read. I also had an incredible Kindergarten teacher when I was in the public school system.  When I was in this teacher's class she noticed that I was consistently mixing up letters like "b...
Read more