So here’s a little life story. When I was a junior in high school, I found this school called Berklee College of Music in Boston. I fell in love instantly. It had film scoring as a major, and was actually the only college with an undergraduate degree in film scoring that I could find. I was hooked.

So I applied and auditioned on August 15th, 2011 in Los Angeles, CA. Then the hard part came. So there’s something about me that you should know in order for you to better understand this story. I’m not a very patient person. You’ll laugh when you hear this next part.

I waited for six months before I found out whether or not I had been accepted. Six, long, stress filled months of being in limbo, not knowing if I would get into my dream school or not. Oh, yes, God was definitely working on the virtue of patience in me.

Well, February 3rd, 2012 came around. And I finally got the email I had been waiting for. I was accepted. I made it into my dream school. I was so excited, and even though I knew the college costed $60,000 per year, I didn’t worry because I knew God wanted me to go there.

Sadly, I was wrong. God did not provide me with the money to go. But I still clung to hope, so I deferred my acceptance until the fall of 2013. I took a semester off, searched for a job (came up empty), and wound up doing a scholarship only audition for Berklee in December of 2012.

May of 2013 came around, and still no money. I then had to make one of the hardest phone calls of my life. I gave up my acceptance, the one I had worked so hard to get. Oddly, even though tears kept streaming down my face, and I couldn’t catch my breath, I felt relieved. Finally, I had an answer.

Well, I spent two semesters at my local community college, spring and fall of 2013. Now that Berklee was out of the picture, I had to figure something else out. So I applied as a transfer student to two schools, Belmont University in Nashville and Houghton College in Houghton, New York.

I was accepted into both, but Belmont was the one I really wanted to go to. Once again, however, God did not give me the money. I was crushed. My whole life, I had grown up dreaming about going to college some day. How could God do this to me again? Was I gonna be stuck in Yucca Valley forever, working at Stater Brothers for the rest of my life?

But then I noticed that all of the doors to Houghton were open. I had the money to go, so I auditioned for the music program, and when I found out I got in, it was settled. I was moving all the way across the country to New York to attend a college that I never even wanted to go to.

And the funny part? I’m in love. I’m in love with New York, I’m in love with the people there, and I’m in love with Houghton. I’m living out my dreams. I always thought I’d be living my dreams at the top contemporary music school in the world, but instead, I’m living my dreams at a very small college in a town so small that in a blink of an eye you’ve driven all the way through it.

It all just goes to show that God’s plans for our lives aren’t always our own. God didn’t want me to attend Berklee, but He wanted me to get in because I learned so much through the process. I think I’ll just give up trying to plan out my life perfectly and leave it up to Him because He obviously knows what He’s doing.