The Graduation Song

When we sold my car last month, Keeleigh inherited the CDs that had been in there since high school. I’m really thankful that I bought all the Now That’s What I Call Music CDs even though some of the songs are totally lame. You can pop them into a CD player and they take you right back. Anyway, Keeleigh was playing one of the Now CDs and a Vitamin C song entitled “Friends Forever” came on. It’s also known as the Graduation Song which is how I think of it because I listened to it a million times my senior year. The first line says, “And so we talked all night about the rest of our lives/Where we're gonna be when we turn 25.” I was in my bedroom folding clothes when I heard that line blaring from my eight-year-old’s stereo and it hit me. I am 25! That’s how I know I’m getting old, because I look back and think, “Where has the time gone!”

The truth is, nothing is like I thought it would be when I was 25! At 18 I was very certain what the future was to hold… I was going to marry Seth Harper and live in Nashville, of course. I researched jobs in Nashville and found that paralegals could make six-figure salaries and the best part was that I could earn a paralegal degree at our local community college in two years. Somehow along the way, however, plans changed. I did earn my paralegal degree but I was not meant to marry my high school sweetheart or live in Nashville. My paralegal professor set me up in an internship at the District Attorney’s office where I became friends and really looked up to the ladies who worked there. One of them, Ann, invited me to bring Keeleigh to vacation bible school at her church and we ended up joining the congregation there a few months later. Ann and another lady at the church, Greta, took it upon themselves to fix me up with Greta’s cousin, Jackie. A year later we were married, Jackie adopted Keeleigh, and last August we added Jathan to our family!

It’s just amazing to me how God can take our plans and make them so much better than anything we could have imagined for ourselves. All of this came to mind when I heard that one, mediocre song from ages ago. Then the next day Keeleigh and I were preparing supper and she said, “I can’t wait to move to Louisiana! Can you? That’s why I’ve been listening to that song so much. It makes me think.” She’d been thinking about this transitional time of our lives just as I had knowing the weight of this move, knowing that it meant things would never be the same.


And suddenly it's like we're women and men/Will the past be a shadow that will follow us round?/Will these memories fade when I leave this town/I keep, I keep thinking that it's not goodbye/Keep on thinking it's a time to fly