This summer, I will be leaving southern California. I have decided to attend the Chicago-Kent College of Law this fall.

This was a very difficult decision for me. While anyone who knows me knows that I have always considered myself a Midwestern girl and never really felt like I fit in the southern California scene, I did my best to remain objective and look at the schools and what they have to offer in my interests.

The entire reason I am going to law school is because I have a passion for international human rights and the dream to work for International Justice Mission one day. After careful consideration, hours of prayer and lengthy spreadsheets 😉 I have come to the conclusion that Chicago-Kent is a better fit for me.

I cannot begin to say how excited I am for this opportunity, and I also am very sad to be leaving several wonderful friendships I have developed during my four years here. However, I am convinced that it’s time to head home, it’s time to knuckle down and continue to discover myself in new ways. It’s time to move. It’s time to take a leap of faith. It’s time to continue to write the story of my life and change the scenery.

It’s a living book, this life; it folds out in a million settings, cast with a billion beautiful characters, and it is almost over for you. It doesn’t matter how old you are; it is coming to a close quickly, and soon the credits will roll and all your friends will fold out of your funeral and drive back to their homes in cold and still and silence. And they will make a fire and pour some wine and think about how you once were . . . and feel a kind of sickness at the idea you never again will be.

So soon you will be in that part of the book where you are holding the bulk of the pages in your left hand, and only a thin wisp of the story in your right. You will know by the page count, not by the narrative, that the Author is wrapping things up. You begin to mourn its ending, and want to pace yourself slowly toward its closure, knowing the last lines will speak of something beautiful, of the end of something long and earned, and you hope the thing closes out like last breaths, like whispers about how much and who the characters have come to love, and how authentic the sentiments feel when they have earned a hundred pages of qualification.

And so my prayer is that your story will have involved some leaving and some coming home, some summer and some winter, some roses blooming out like children in a play. My hope is your story will be about changing, about getting something beautiful born inside of you, about learning to love a woman or a man, about learning to love a child, about moving yourself around water, around mountains, around friends, about learning to love others more than we love ourselves, about learning oneness as a way of understanding God. We get one story, you and I, and one story alone. God has established the elements, the setting and the climax and the resolution. It would be a crime not to venture out, wouldn’t it?

-Donald Miller, ‘Through Painted Deserts’