Getting to Know Me
By April, written fall 2005
I am a senior at Arizona Lutheran Academy! This is my first year here. I don’t really know anyone and I don’t really talk all that much. It’s a major change from where I originally came from.
San Carlos Apache reservation, that’s my hometown. It’s not the safest or greatest environment to call home but to me it’s something different. It never really came to my attention how much friends can play a big role in ones life, until I came here.
Right about now I miss home, my friends, and most of all, being myself. I feel that now that I have come to a Christian school it seems as though I have to be more conservative about my actions and the way I live. Back at home I wasn’t the perfect angel that everyone saw me as; let’s just say that we all have skeletons in our closets. I had plenty of them. And to this day, I still do. But one thing I did notice about the problems I faced, the struggles I had to live with, and the skeletons that I hid could be helped by my best friend. My mother told me about this person in whom I can place all my trust. This person is God.
Throughout my whole life I was born and raised a Lutheran. My father was raised in a Lutheran boarding school and never attended a public school in his life, neither did his sisters or his cousins. When I say my whole family grew up Lutheran I mean my whole entire family on my dad's side. And as a loving father who wants the same benefits for me, he suggested I come to school here.
At home I did attend church but just not as often as I would have wanted to. In my sophomore year at high school, that’s when my life entirely changed; I was growing to become a young woman, and learning the reality of life. I learned about enemies, just never taught myself the proper and godly way of how to treat them. I was a fierce person in my soul that only wanted to do things that I wanted. I met friends who loved and cherished me for who I was and a family that got me the things I needed to survive. I would go out on weekends and on weekdays I was always with the big crowds at school, only because of the things that we did, they weren’t the positive things either. Until one night.
After so many nights of being deviant and rebellious, God had a plan to change my life forever. It was a weekend of winter ball in the cold night of January - my junior year of high school. All my friends were all going out and meeting up just to hang out and chill after the dance.
By the next Monday we all had to return to school but it wasn’t the same ….. Nothing was ever going to be the same. A group of four people that I hung out with went out and murdered someone, not intentionally, but accidentally. My close friends, the people I looked up to, went and did something dangerously wrong.
Every night I sat up thinking about how things could change and things could be different, until suddenly, my mothers’ familiar voice was in my head reminding me about that one friend that I always had, that one friend that never changed, that was always there for me, by my side, God. I prayed, I cried, I even came to school here, by my own choice, for the sake of myself.
To this day, my four friends are in prison serving time from 3-9 years. For their sake, I learn God’s Word, I feel God in my heart, his love and all the things he did for me. I thank him for letting me wake up to my family every morning, and although I don’t have that much, I thank him for the very few friends I have here at A.L.A. for it was that one friend that changed my whole life...God.
I also thank him for giving me the audacity to tell my friends that even though I may not be by their side sitting in that cell all alone, that even though I may not visit them every time they get a visiting day, I may not be there every time they have a trial hearing, I may not be there to lend a helping hand or a shoulder to cry on, but I do know one true friend who will always be there no matter what. Someone so strong as to move mountains, and to pause time, someone that gives you strength to do the all the things that you desire. Now to me, I don’t know any friend who can do that besides my greatest friend, God, and I know that he could be theirs as well.