NYU & me

I graduated from NYU last week. Like many big accomplishments, it was the product of the influence of many great people, a great amount of faith, a great deal of support and a LOT of hard work. Parents who provided, a church family that raised me, a new church that changed my life, an organization that blossomed so beautifully, friends who championed me, and a school that provided a global, diverse, and wonderful education. The past 5 years (2 deferred and 3 in New York) have taught me many things. Among them, the process & pain in the building of resilience, the importance of an open mind & heart, and the crazy things that bold faith can do. I graduated from my dream school with honors in a major that I created, wrote, and got approved after a two hour presentation and a massive thesis — in international human rights, public policy, journalism, and media/communication — and I am so grateful to all of you who have contributed to this journey in some way. It would be remiss of me not to thank you. 

I don’t even really know where to begin when I think about the faithfulness and wild adventure my time at NYU has been. Going to college is one thing, a lot of change, a massive amount of independence, etc., but going to college in the middle of New York City is another thing entirely. Along with being a college student, you are forced to become an adult and a New Yorker all at once. To navigate a subway system along with new classrooms and buildings. To deal with the noise and the lights and the sheer magnitude of it all, right alongside your pursuit of friendships and good grades and internships. It’s all a bit surreal, but I think that’s why most of us choose the school in the first place — not having the traditional college experience never felt like a sacrifice when getting to live in New York felt like such an incredible gain. What I was learning in my classes, be it about art or culture or even the heavier things like wealth disparity and human/civil rights abuses, was also all around me, a living, breathing education. I worked with the UN, which is a few blocks north, interviewing ambassadors and world leaders from as early as my first month of school. I’ve walked through movie sets and seen so many things being filmed just from my daily stroll through Washington Square Park. I’ve taken classes from and been lectured to by some of the world’s top artists and thinkers — and so so so much more. 

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I’d wanted to go to NYU since I was ten years old. I knew even then that I was called to the Apple, reasons uncertain, but direction clear. I toured the school my junior year of high school, a rainy, hot, summer day, the kind of weather that makes people from Southern California thank God for their consistent 70 degrees and lack of humidity. This was the kind of weather that should have turned me away, but instead, I just fell more in love. That’s love anyway isn’t it? Seeing something at its worst and still choosing it, still seeing its beauty? 

Maybe that’s dramatic, but I’m an actress, sue me.

I found out I got into NYU in the middle of the Dulles Airport in Washington, DC, on my way back from a conference. I remember screaming in the terminal and laying on the floor and it is a sheer miracle I was not arrested for making such a scene so close to the capital city. 

It has not all been easy, and in a lot of ways my journey has been rather unconventional (but I’ve never been a fan of the conventional). I deferred my enrollment for two years after high school. My entire life and faith changed in those to years in many ways which I will probably talk about at some point, but for now I will just say — God’s timing usually is not ours, but it is always better. There was so much He needed to form in me, so many things He had to put in place before I came to New York, and so much work to be done in me before I was ready to stand firm in a city that would come at me hard and fast everyday. Had I gone to NYU when I thought I was supposed to, or even a moment earlier than He wanted me to, the church that has changed me for the better wouldn’t have even been Manhattan, the best friends I made would not have even been at the school, and so. much. more. 

My first year, I was a good 2-3 years older than everyone I lived with, I’d never had to navigate snow, I was a few weeks out of an awful breakup from a long relationship, and I had only ever known the suburbs. The first few months were tough and lonely, but I was so starry-eyed that I was living in the grandest city in the world that I hardly noticed. When that faded, things got really hard. I was confronted about my faith almost everyday, by random strangers, professors, other students, and a lot people it seemed, thought Christianity was the enemy. 

But the thing is, good teachers give a test after the lesson. And He had just spent the past two years teaching me all about His faithfulness, all about why I believed what I believed. I had just been on a spiritual journey reading about a bunch of other religions and their texts, only to come back to the profound love of Jesus and undeniable truth of the Gospel. Now came the testing, the shaping, the refining, and I am better for it. And at a certain point I realized that He had already won the war for me. It was not my job to fight so hard everyday, it was actually just my job to stand firm, love  others well, and let Him do the rest. 

And that He did. I learned to let the city interrupt me. I learned that in a place so full of people, most of them still feel alone, and it is part of my life’s mission to make people feel less alone and more known. I learned that a lot of people have been hurt which is most of the time what makes them rough or rude or even political, and if you can understand hurt, you can usually find the patience to care more deeply. I learned that you don’t have to agree with everyone, but you can learn something from everyone. I’ve learned that life is rarely linear, but straight lines don’t make the most exciting art anyway. 

Even though this last year of my education was cut short, and it did not end the way I’d always imagined, in a flurry of purple in a big baseball stadium, I was reminded sweetly by God that just because something ended in a way you did not want, doesn’t meant what already happened in the story changes. It was still wild and good and radically life-changing, and I would trade none of it. 

One last thing I’ll share, in the theme of God’s faithfulness is this — I’ve been working on constructing my own major for the past few years in my program at NYU. This essentially means you take a few different areas of study and find their intersection, then you write a biiiiig paper on it, put together a booklist of curriculum, and present it for two hours in front of a board at the end of your college career. I wrote my paper on the way that narrative in entertainment and media interacts with human rights policy, and how important the individual’s story is. My presentation happened a few weeks ago, and my board was made up of some of the smartest policy and human rights intellectuals I know. They asked me so many questions, about theory and my texts, but at the very end, my advisor, who I’ve talked about church with many times with little reciprocated interest, looked at me and said:

“So my final question is this — I know that alongside your academic pursuits, you’ve also had strong religious pursuits. Can you tell us how your faith interacts with what you’ve studied?”

I looked at her with my mouth wide open, before I got to share how God’s heart is for the one. How He cares about the oppressed, is a God of justice, and how the fact that we were created with purpose necessitates the need for rights. I shared about how while mainline Christianity has sometimes done damage and hurt people, if you look at who Jesus was, we see that He didn’t like the religious fundamentalists, He wanted people to care about their neighbor, to serve one another, and how much He cares about each individual hardship and narrative. 

What a WILD way to end my time at school. What a full circle moment. He has never been absent from any of this, His faithfulness has followed me all the way through. His timing was hardly ever mine, and the trials were not ones I would have chosen, but I am firm in the belief that our good God uses all things for good. Here’s to the next good thing.