In the fall of 2000 I somehow lucked out and got to spend four months living in a giant villa on the Grand Canal in Venice, Italy. I’d spent the two months prior kicking around Ireland doing some work for the Lord, and by the time I arrived in Venice I felt like an old salt, with my bright yellow duffel bag filled to the gills with everything I’d need for weekends on the train and kicking around southern Europe.

The house hosted about 20 students and a professor every semester, and the sala was filled with these old journals that every member of every class had signed at the end of their tenure. A few weeks ago one of my former Venice-mates sent me a Facebook message that the Wake Forest library had taken the journals and scanned them into .pdf files and placed them on their website.

I had such mixed feelings finding these old words, which I didn’t entirely think I’d ever see again, or at least, not this unexpectedly. That semester was such an important turning point in my life, and not in the way that people talk about when they tell you about their semesters abroad. I was challenged and afraid and scared at every turn, but so proud of myself for having made this dream come true. I was poor, and I hated it, but I also felt sorry for some of the people I knew who went abroad and for whom the adventure was dulled by an overabundance of money; after all, there’s no way to enjoy a foreign landscape except by worrying that you might be stranded there for the rest of your life.

So much changed for me this semester; I’m a person who processes things when he’s alone and away from them, and in Italy I basically had 4 months to process my entire adolescence, which was ending. It was difficult, but it was amazing. I’m still grateful for that time.

Some of the specific things I reference in the letter are stories and posts in themselves; I’ll remember to tell you sometime about Mauro.

It made me happy to read these words, even if I did cringe a bit at the poor writing and even more at the haircut (or lack of said). A week after this I buzzed off my hair, and while I’d forgotten that I used to sign all correspondence with Romans 8.38-39, I totally did.