Leaving Home

The only question I would have when speaking about leaving home would be, which time? I’ve left home so many times. Each summer for things like Especially For Youth, or Scout Camp, or later in life for college, or for my mission. Each time I was half a world away from my home and my family. I suppose, however, that the most difficult of these would be when I left for college.

We lived in Maryland for my senior year of high school. I enjoyed the school, was on the wrestling team, and was accepted to Brigham Young University. I was excited to go! My parents and I decided that the easiest way to get to college would be to drive there in the family minivan. As in me drive there in the family minivan. Alone. It would be the first road trip I’d ever been on where I was the driver, since I had only obtained my first license earlier in the school year.

I had a good friend named Stephanie Miller and she needed to go to BYU as well. Our parents talked about things and decided it would be great for us to drive across together. So my dad taught me how to change a tire, we packed up everything and get ready to go. My family had just been given the assignment to go to Hong Kong for my dad’s work, so they left to the airport a few days before I was to leave for Utah. I was then alone.

I was largely unaffected. I was excited to be taking the road trip. I loved to drive and I was ecstatic that the minivan would be mine for my freshman year of college. It was great to know that I would have a car!

On Sunday I went to church in our family ward. That was when it really started to sink in. I had never really been in church without my family before. That had been a constant throughout my life; when you’re at church, your family is too. I sat there thinking of how much I loved my family. Tears came to my eyes as the congregation sang, of all hymns, “Families Can Be Together Forever” as the closing hymn. I realized that I missed my family very much, but I was happy to be on my own. I felt the Lord letting me know that everything would be okay, that I was doing the right thing. I left the next day for college, had a great road trip, and everything was wonderful.