If I Could Be Young Again, I Wouldn't Choose Junior High

I dressed for a run yesterday early in the morning.  The afternoon was waning before I could get out the door.  I was reluctant because the temperature hovered only in the mid-20s.  But I was surprised.  The deep afternoon sun. a cloudless blue sky, and a lack of wind seemed to banish the cold.  Again, my fear of "what could have been" almost robbed me of the joy of "what actually was" outside my door.

I rounded the last half-mile home, just in time for dismissal of the local junior high school.  The sidewalks were jammed with clumps of girls pretending to be older than their years, all dressed in the exact same jackets, leggings and boots.  The boys pushed each other off the sidewalk, letting loose their energy restrained for the past seven hours. Some awkward teens lagged behind the others, those who surmise their solitude is eternal.   I ran in the street, dodging the buses and carpools.

I have NEVER met anyone who said that junior high was the best years of their lives.  For most of us, our junior high experience is located somewhere between the ninth and tenth circles of Dante's Inferno.  I wanted to cry out to those kids on the sidewalk:  "There is hope.  You will live through this, I promise."

For me, junior high was living through a reign of terror, where there was but a misplaced hair between cool and cruel.  The self-acclaimed "popular" girls conformed so tightly to an invisible standard that even carrying too many books, and you were out, cast forever into a social abyss.  There is only one thing worse than junior high exile, and that is the fear of it. 

When I was in junior high, being in style included miniskirts, fishnet stockings, and white go-go boots, nothing more ridiculous looking than that.  But I need not apply.  My mom had discovered the blue light specials at a new store called Kmart which was the cultural equivalent of signing your own fashion death warrant.

But I survived junior high.  I wouldn't have believed it at the time.  I often walked to school with a stomach ache from being so shy.  But the very same God I clung to then, to Whom I cried in the night, is the same God who still sustains me, through valleys a lot deeper than the angst of junior high.

My only regret is that I didn't trust Him more.