• The ultimate 4-year BreakAway? College!

As a one-time college teacher/preacher (and student, many times), I have forever soapboxed about the sacred value of the college BreakAway. It’s the ultimate experience, after all, combining learning, relationship-building, tradition, experimentation, and so much more (whatever you make of it!).

In the College BreakAway Gospel, here are some important commandments: Stay in the same place for 4 years (but do off-campus opportunities); focus on friends and teachers and people; open your mind and try new things; do MUCH MORE than simply studies (sports, music, volunteering, leadership); make memories of all kinds and places; amp up your values and ethics; learn to write.

If you follow that advice, it’s amazing what a $70K tuition (more or less) can buy you these days. All the above, one hopes. And if you’re really lucky, enough hand sanitizer to last until the next…pandemic? Or at least graduation day.

Life is good for my daughter, a senior in high school—today’s sur-realities notwithstanding. Yet doing the college search and visits campaign has become increasingly complex (and it’s never been easy). Interested in playing a sport and wanting to attend the showcase camps, tourneys, and events—where the matchmaking usually occurs? Good luck with that. They’ve been cancelled since March, leaving athletes and teams in suspenseful hesitation. With no clear end or solution in sight.

But we have managed a few presentations, tours, meetings, and walk-arounds. At one university—which had delayed bringing students to campus—we stumbled upon these tons of hand sanitizer. They’re ready for the onslaught of co-eds, contagions, and fate.

So keep the fate. I mean faith. As College Preacher Kirk also says, the process is always strenuous and stressful. But a perfect-enough match usually transpires in the end somehow.