Words by Mandy Cole | Image by Ryan McGill

There are times in your life when you wonder why things don’t work out the way you intended—times when you learn that God’s hand is providentially guiding your path, despite your best-laid plans.

I can honestly say my journey to Walker College was by divine intervention. I had fully prepared to attend a particular four-year institution and had put all my proverbial eggs into that basket. When that door closed, it wasn’t hard to see that the offer of a two-year scholarship to Walker College with a transfer scholarship to The University of Alabama was something I couldn’t turn down. What I didn’t see at the time was that God was going to use my time at Walker College to provide some of the most wonderful, genuine, and treasured people in my life.

The best part of Walker College was the friendships I made. Those people are still my dearest friends today. Despite going our separate ways after our time there, we never really separated. We have been through undergraduate and graduate schools, birthdays, weddings, the births and adoptions of children, parenting joys and woes, starting to take care of our own parents, family deaths….and well, just LIFE! These people have become such an integral part of me, and it is a precious gift that was cultivated on that charming campus on Indiana Avenue.

My time at Walker College allowed me to have the close comfort of home and the freedom to stake my independence. It was quaint enough that I knew many people but diverse enough to still meet new friends.

Walker College was about Rebels basketball games, hanging out in the student center, or planning themed costume parties with skits. It was homecomings, dances, midnight Waffle House runs, Circle K Club meetings, and borrowing my dad’s boat to take all my girlfriends fishing on Smith Lake. It was sneaking into the broadcast room to make hilarious and silly memories on the studio cameras and pulling an all-nighter to meet the deadline for the yearbook. It was a library that still closed at 9 p.m. and being forced to pile up in my parent’s dining room for a late-night study session where Mom would have spaghetti on the stove or homemade biscuits fresh out of the oven waiting on us. It was having a standing date every Thursday afternoon at Victoria’s for lunch between class and chemistry lab and maybe even finding Dr. Clyde P. Davis there with us on occasion (I doubt he would have ever admitted it, but I am almost certain we were his favorite chemistry students).

There was something about that small college on the hill that knitted us together; a common bond that tied us for life. Words seem to be inadequate to describe how that junior college shaped my life. I will be eternally grateful that I had the opportunity to have been a part of it.

I can almost guarantee if you were to ask me any day of the week what I think of my time at Walker College, I will most certainly say, “If I had never gone to Walker College, I would have missed out on the most precious kindred friends of a lifetime.” 

Thank you, Lord, for your blessings, planned and otherwise.