Changing?

People are expected to change greatly over their first year of college. And, well, I'm at college- and I wonder if I'm changing.

I look no different. I talk no differently. I'd like to think I think no differently. But I feel... older...  How I see and relate to the world is changing.

It is not as if I have learned of any evils I did not know before. And yet my constant and magnified exposure to mankind  has given me a new understanding of humanity in its natural state which I did not have before.

I had known primarily the sons of God- and now I know the sons of men.

I feel like the Green Lady in Perelandra. When Ransom tries to explain to her the concept of loss and discontentment, she remains pure- she is not defiled. But just as her brow furrowed in reply to him so I too could look my college in the face and charge it, with a curious sense of both loss and gain, "You make me older more quickly than I can bear."

Every day I face constant self-evaluations. 

What should I have done when my teacher made a cynical comment about Christ and the Cross- passed over in a second, but made from an obvious lack of understanding?

Is there something to say when my teachers tell the class we get our morals from our parents?

What do you do when you're scheduled for a class and you pass a Planned Parenthood table with  girls- my age- slipping up to it. (Can you hear the lives being snuffed out?) Do you stop? If I have time- do I eat my lunch, hand out Crisis Pregnancy fliers, or witness to people of the God who can save their body and soul?

I pray a lot- snatches- during the day- mostly along the lines of "What do I do?... what should I have done?"

Yes, older. College. Marriage. Children. -All instruments of sanctification, mirrors in which we soul-search. Who am I? Really. To what extent do I mirror my Father? To what extent am I Christ to those around me?

Isn't it strange that growing in God means a reversion to child-like faith: innocent and fearless? But such is the ironic walk of a Christian. For the more I grow in Christ, the more I realize how young I am- and how far I must go before every inch of my heart is His- before my every action and word reflects my Father- before I understand the depth and breath of what it means to be a child of God.

"It is very strange to say one is young at the moment one is speaking. But tomorrow I shall be older." - Perelandra by C.S. Lewis