Previous Challenge Entry (Level 1 – Beginner)
Topic: Season(s) of a year or life (01/13/11)
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TITLE: ABC, Great Grammy Shari | Previous Challenge Entry
By Tiara Huffman
01/20/11 -
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I had just gotten accepted into ABC—Alaska Bible College—so shouldn’t I have been more happy? This was the college I’d been hoping to get into…then why was I was down about it?
It was this really, the coming and going of fall, spring and summer. In Alaska it is just different variants of cold. I would miss the crisp cool breeze that danced over my shoulders nearly bringing me to a shiver, but just before the chilly wind could do so the sun would smile down to chase away the chill.
I was almost sure I wouldn’t have any smiling sun in Alaska. And why had I chosen a bible college in Alaska? I blame my friend Lisa…but really that’s not why at all.
I was starting the winter quarter at ABC for one reason, the outreach program opened for all students. For the whole of that semester we—those that are part of the program—would be given a disadvantaged family. Providing food and money for these families was just the beginning of this program.
It wouldn’t just stop at giving them food and money to provide for them. We would spend time with them being their friends and loving them when they felt they had nothing to look forward to. There was events planed all throughout the winter semester were a gathering of all the families and their sponsors got together just to have fun and do something these families never would have been able to do.
Lisa attended school the year before me, and at the end they planned a trip to Disney Land. I had never been, and I couldn’t believe that ABC had managed to raise the money to send so many there.
Lisa had informed me that the program was a sister program of the school, it was ran by New Life outreach of Alaska and that they worked together to plan it all. And because it wasn’t a school ran program that only extra credit was given and that you were still expected to attend a full class schedule.
“It was the hardest but the most fulfilling year of my life.” She had told me the night I decided to apply for ABC and I had gotten in, but getting into the NLOA program was not easy. They only allowed thirty students into the program each year, and it was a first come first served thing, and often first year students did have the chance to sign up.
But last minute a senior dropped out do to an illness in the family.
“You ready to go sweetie?” My father called from the door his smile as bright as the sun. It warmed my heart and melted away the woes of saying goodbye to the coming and going of seasons. Because I knew then that in the next season of my life all I needed was the smiling faces of the family I was going to get to be a part of for a time.
“Yes dad I am ready. We have a plane to catch, a campus to tour and paperwork to fill-out! I can’t wait to meet the Strasburg’s. Little Cara and Peter, dad they are so cute. I have a feeling they will impart more into my life than I will them.” My dad ruffled my brown hair.
“I think they will too Shari.”
“What happened next?” Sara Lynn called at my feet.
“What do you think? Great Grammy Shari met Great Grappy Jeff, Cara and Peter’s older brother. They married and had our dad, duh!” Alexander said. I laughed then.
“Well, it didn’t quiet happen that way. I didn’t know they had an older brother see, he was staying with his Aunt and Uncle. They were putting him through college for his parents. He tried to send money when he could, but that wasn’t very often. See I never saw great Grappy Jeff until after I’d finished the program. He’d finished up his schooling and returned home the following spring; I had gone home just before then. Mid summer I received a letter from them, asking that I come stay with them a week. And that’s when I met Grappy Jeff. We had a summer/fall romance and that was one of the best years in my life.”
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I think your story could have been even better, if you had focused more on the romance and less on the college entrance.