CARRIE TILTON | opinion editor

Every year at APU I have been faced with difficult decisions. Freshman year my tough decision was whether or not to drop out of Bel Canto. I cried and prayed over this decision for months, trying to work up the courage to follow my heart and ignore the huge sense of guilt I felt.

Sophomore year I had to decide to move out of my apartment and away from a very negative living situation.

Junior year I had to convince myself to stick with my commitment as a second year Alpha leader, because I wasn’t sure I had a place in the program anymore.

This year, my decision was about whether or not to quit the Clause and resign as Opinion Editor. As of this week, I have decided to do so. This will be my last column. It is difficult for me to quit something, especially because it involves leaving a staff I enjoy and a newspaper I support.

As I’ve been thinking about resigning, memories of freshman year and choir keep coming back to me. All semester I have felt this year strangely parallels many experiences from my freshman year, and this decision further validated my feeling.

As a freshman, my goal for college was to learn how to listen to myself and how to find the courage to pursue what I really wanted even if I didn’t have a cheerleading squad of supportive people behind me. When I decided to quit choir and, more recently, the Clause all I really wanted was to hear my parents shout, “give me a Q, give me a U, give me an I, give me a T!” But they did offer me patience and support, giving me the chance to make the choice that was best for me.

This has been my most precious lesson in college: follow your intuition. I used to think that “following your heart” was so cliché and selfish as a Christian, but when Nick Vujicic spoke in chapel on Monday he said you have to follow your heart because the Holy Spirit will guide you. This inclusion of the Holy Spirit into a phrase I once believed was a non-Christian excuse to get away with whatever you wanted helped me see that it is the Holy Spirit behind my intuition telling me what to do next.

Freshman year, quitting choir was the best decision I could have made, not because of the choir itself, but because it was the first time I genuinely listened to myself and knew what I wanted. Moving out of my apartment mid-sophomore year led me to the first semester I could call APU home while living in the mods. And, returning to Alpha for the second year led to one of the best years of my life with eight of the biggest blessings in my AC group.

I do not know what choosing to leave the Clause will bring in my life. But I do know that my goal in learning to follow my heart and know what I really want has come full circle.