senior - emily! - Kaitlyn Phipps Photography

Personal, Portraits

senior – emily!

Today’s blog post is going to be hard to write, because this college senior and almost graduate is so close to my heart!

Do you ever wish you could go back in time and tell your however year old self something? Okay good, so I’m not alone. I can’t describe how often I’ve wished to go back to college or high school and just give some “wise” words to myself, and to encourage my younger self and tell her that it’s going to be okay. How cool would that be?! As weird as it is, I feel like God gave me that in my friend Emily.

I got to meet Emily at the end of her freshman year of college, back when she was still a ginger (:]) and still looking for answers in this world. The Emily I knew two years ago is so different than the Emily I know now. She gave her life to Christ at the beginning of her sophomore year and I feel like I got this front row to seat to seeing her fall in love with Jesus and letting God change her from the inside out. Her experience in college was so, so similar to mine. We’ve got a weird amount of similarities both family and spiritually and personality wise. We’re also really different in a lot of ways, but sometimes, I just get this glimpse of me at 19, 20, and 21. And it always leads me to thankfulness.

I love having Emily in my life, because selfishly, it’s fun to have someone who gets me, but also because I get to see God at work in her heart. I get to see her learn some of the same things I learned in college about life with Christ and I get to see her struggle through hard things and she invites me into it with her. I could go on and on about what Emily means to me personally and to my relationship with Jesus…but I’ll stop here and tell you what I know she means to a lot of other people. (but also she really loves nerdy things like me so that’s a plus as well)

Emily’s a good friend. She remembers to ask you about things in your life, she gets excited with you and celebrates your victories. She’s always honest and she presses in to the hard things, even when she really doesn’t want to. She’s just real. She’ll tell you when she’s having a bad day. Also I’ve got to brag on her…she’s graduating college in THREE years and she’s so driven and intelligent. I’m so ridiculously glad that she’s not leaving just yet. She’ll be pursuing her masters here at Radford, so that means she’ll be around :]

Okay well now that I’ve written a novel; I’m very, VERY excited to show you Emily’s senior portraits. Love you lots friend.