It Gets Harder Every Time

"Don't go back to school, Tisy!"
I pillowed my chin on Burgee's head and hugged her tight. Last night, I had her cuddled up against my knees, doing her Latin homework while I corrected papers for Linguistics. It was such a joy to talk to her, to watch her picking sentences apart and distinguishing passive tenses from present ones or perfect ones. But now it is morning, and I have to go...
"I has to go, Burgee." I said, using our family babytalk dialect.
"No you doesn't!"
"I does. I sorry, but I does. I wuf you!"
"I want you to stay home and bake cookies with me!"
I looked over her head at our family room, at dark polished wood and prussian blue and tapestry fabrics, at thick carpet and reading lamps and books and fireplace. I looked down at the kitchen table where I stood hugging her, at the tablecloth that Mama just finished last night, while she and I talked until 12 AM. Suddenly, it became very difficult to let her go.
"I has to go, Burgee." I murmured into her hair. "I has to."
"But I need you!"
I detached myself from her arms, silently cursing higher education. What good is higher education, anyway? Who cares what Sidney said about poetry and literary theory five hundred years ago? Who cares what Chandler has to say about sign systems and semiotics? Who cares if Euclid wrote a fifth postulate? This is now, and here, and I'm alive, and I want to live for God and his people, pour myself into them, watch them grow up into God as I grow with them... I want my family, my dear ones, my best friends--I never got over the first crushing wave of homesickness in my Freshman year. Here I am a Junior, and every time I go "back to school", it gets harder to say goodbye.

I begin the familiar prayer... Da mi, Domine, scire et intellegere... Augustine's prayer: give to me, Lord, to know and to understand...but I don't know why, and I can't understand why, and all I know or understand is that it's hard and it hurts.

I want to stay here....

The heart speaks thus, but the soul answers: "Go. Learn the things that you must learn at school. Grow in the ways in which you must grow at school. A season for everything, remember?"

So I swallow my tears, and let my baby sister go again. I've missed three years of her life. I may miss two more. She's fourteen, Lord. How much longer do I have before she's gone to college? How can it be that this is good and right?

Be still, my heart. Cease your stirrings. You know that you are within the will of God, and in this you must be content; you must freely submit to and take pleasure in God's sovereign and fatherly disposal.

Da mi, Domine... give to me to rest in your heart, for my heart is restless.