my recruitment story.

With eager hands, I ripped open the envelope. The envelope I’d been fantasizing about for months on end. It had a bit of weight to it, heavy and cream-colored, with a light red trim. The excitement buzzed in my stomach. This is it, I told myself. You’re about to be in your top choice sorority.

As I tore open the envelope, my eyes fell onto the paper inside, decorated with a different sorority’s seal than the one I’d wanted. Written in a fanciful font were the words: We invite Eva Parker to be a sister of our sorority.
There had to be a mistake. This envelope couldn’t have been meant for me—these were not the letters I’d spent all of rush week (and then some) dreaming about. These were not the letters of the girls who told me, “We’ll see you at bid day tomorrow!” as I exited the doors of their house the night before.
I dropped the envelope on the gym floor and walked away from it, hot tears streaming down my face. All around me, girls were screaming with delight, tackling one another with big, fat bear hugs, throwing up their new signs, throwing on the jerseys that they’d been given. And all I could blearily think was, Please tell me this is a nightmare. I want to wake up. Please let this be some awful, horrible, twisted dream and dear God, please let this not be real. 
One of my dear friends who was also in my rush group saw my disappointment and hugged me. “It’s going to be okay,” she said. “It’s all going to work out. God has a plan for you.”
While I knew this to be true in my heart of hearts, those were the last words I wanted to hear at that moment. I wanted to scream. I wanted to go somewhere and drive really fast and play my music really loud and yell at whoever’s decision it was to cut me the night before bid day. I wanted to go back, rewind to the night before, and do something differently. Anything. Whatever it was that made them decide I was not worth their time.
Bid day of 2017 marked the beginning of a very difficult journey that I hadn’t realized I needed to embark on: One where my very identity was uprooted and planted into much more fertile, fruitful soil. You’d think this would be an amazing experience, and mostly, it was, but the undercurrents of it were filled with pain and angst and nights alone that made me question what the heck God wanted from me. I dropped the bid I got from the house I didn’t feel connected to, and to this day, I don’t regret that decision. I know what God wanted from me in that season was independence in more than one way: independence from Greek life, and independence to do the hard thing and be entirely unaffiliated (an anomaly at my school, located in the heart of the Deep South).
Fast forward past the initial grief, confusion, and sadness, I came to realize that I had two choices: I could wallow in the deep-cutting sting of rejection— or I could move past it, ask for prayer and guidance, trust God’s vision for my life, and try to figure out what it was going to take for me to feel okay again.
The months that followed were truly so humbling yet life-giving in the best way. Some people ignored and glazed over my pain; others were keen to it and gave me so much grace, love, and affirmation that it truly blew me away. 

It was humbling in the sense that I realized where my identity had lain just before bid day: in my future sorority. My top-choice house became my obsession. I thought about what it would feel like to walk around campus bearing the letters I would be so proud to represent. I thought about how good and accomplished I would feel to have been invited into such a top-tier house, knowing in my heart that I was good enough. I thought about what the community would be like and how strong and deep my friendships were going to be. In all honesty, I was idolizing my relationships with my nonexistent sorority sisters before my relationship with the One who created me.
It was life-giving in the sense that, following the intense humbling of realizing my intentions, I was able to give and receive love in a way that felt weightless. I learned that you can’t accept love in doses, you can’t only accept love from the people you want to be seen with. You accept and give love in its purest form to those you don’t even have a reason to love. You love because you were created to do so. You love because it’s the hard thing to do. And that is what was shown to me by a select group of people who embodied God’s goodness in human form when I felt like I wasn’t good enough to be seen or known or loved by them in that season. 
I came to terms with my life as an independent, more or less. The wound still stung when I helped my roommate get ready for her formal, or when I took pictures of my hall mates leaving for a date party, or when Vail got deathly silent on Sunday nights when more than half of the building left for chapter, or when I watched my friends walk to their sorority house—my top choice house—for initiation, and the only plans I had that night were to sit in my dorm and wait for them to get back.
For the longest time, subconsciously, I saw my year of being an independent as a punishment. As a curse. As a thing I had to trudge through because I was being penalized for caring too much about which house I ended up in. I loathed the dreaded question, “Which sorority are you in?” because the impending answer was one that I didn’t want. It wasn’t my wish to have my answer be, “None.” But it was. And I felt weird, shameful, and exposed for that. It hurt so bad. It was like a knife being twisted in my gut every time I told someone that, yes, I was one of the unlucky few who had to experience the pain of rejection and shame on bid day. They prepare you for that possibility in the Recruitment 101 meeting, but you never ever think it’s actually going to be you who has to face that truth. You always think, “Someone else—not me.”
Well, it was me. And I had to face it. I had to live through it. I had to cry it out alone and seek shelter internally because when it came down to it, only a select few really understood the depth of my pain. I couldn’t always verbally process it with my friends, for fear that they’d think I was fixating on it too much. It felt like such a silly, trivial thing to be so torn up about, but there I was, ripped to shreds over the rejection.
It took me almost until April to see independence as the gift that it was. God gave me the gift of not having to pay sorority dues for a whole year! He gave me the gift to become so aligned with Him that I would never confuse my identity again! He gave me the gift of getting to be friends with people in every sorority, not just the one I wanted to be in! He gave me the gift of getting to share my story with people! I’d mistaken this gift as one big, stinking mess—a twisted mass of hurt and rejection and shame and unworthiness. But God was calling me to get through the shame and know Him deeper and rely on Him solely and lead other women who have felt the sting of rejection themselves to His arms.
That’s why I’m sharing my story with y’all today. If I’ve declared my entire life one that will be used for God’s glory, I would be stupid to let this story sit in my draft pile somewhere (yes, that draft pile is real and it exists and there’s so many unsaid words in that darned thing). I can’t be silent about this one thing because it might be somewhat embarrassing. I’ll say it till the cows come home: Resilience is built in vulnerability. Trust is built in vulnerability. And the only way I can fully share the Gospel is if I am vulnerable with my deepest spiritual heartaches. 

This is the truth I choose to believe in, from Shauna Niequist's book Bittersweet: 
"Heartbreak brings us to lots of places--to despair, to bitterness, to emptiness, to numbness, to isolation. But because God is just that good, if we allow the people who love us to walk with us right through the brokenness, it can also lead to a deep sense of God's presence. When things fall apart, the broken places allow all sorts of things to enter, and one of them is the presence of God."

Despite the heartbreak of last year’s recruitment, I prayerfully decided to go through recruitment again this fall for more reasons than one. It’s a decision that I’m at peace with. It’s a decision that was not made alone. It’s a decision that scared me and put me back in that gym, teary-eyed and hurt. It’s a decision that made me feel the aftereffect of everything that happened to me, in the best and worst ways possible.
Going through rush again, I trusted in this and this alone: Romans 5:1-5 says we only get peace through our Lord Jesus Christ: “through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace we now stand. And we boast in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.”
I prayed that God’s will would be done, but, if possible, one that simultaneously included a much less painful outcome than the previous year. I prayed for hope and perseverance and character all wrapped up—that God would give me so much of it that I would be bursting at the seams.

That prayer has been answered in the form of Chi Omega: the house filled with girls that consistently loved me well during my season of heartache. The house where I felt most at home, even when I couldn't officially call it mine. The house I most secretly wanted to be apart of, but could never allow myself to dream such a thing could happen. 
The joy you see on my face in the attached photo is genuine and real and raw and unscripted. If you had told me a year ago that I would get to experience bid day with my best friends in Chi O as a sophomore, I wouldn't have believed you. Now I stand here thankful and overjoyed to get to be sisters with the people who are closest to my heart.

The thing is, though, that prayer would've been answered even if I hadn't received a bid. That story would've been redeemed even if I had decided not to rush again.
God's in the business of redemption, and His reach is not limited to just fixing sadness. He could've restored my story in a myriad of ways, but man, am I thankful that He chose to do it through the loving sisterhood of Chi Omega.

To close this ridiculously long blog post, I want to leave you with this: don't choose to walk through your heartache alone. It makes the pain so much harder. As humbling as it is to share this story, I know that this isn't a story about my lack of competence or desirability. I know this is a story about God's enoughness and His constant desire for our pure, unadulterated hearts.

**If you know ANYONE who has felt the heartache of recruitment in one form or another, please have them reach out to me. Give them my number or Insta DM me or whatever it takes for them to feel known and seen and loved and heard and never alone when it seems like twenty thousand girls are strutting around in their sorority letters. I've been in those dark corners of strange sadness and I am more than happy to sit with them, and just maybe pour some light into that corner.