Seventh-day Adventism is a protestant religion that accepts the bible as the only source of their beliefs. Some of those beliefs include; the second coming, the trinity, and observing the Sabbath. Most Seventh-day Adventists follow a vegetarian diet and focus on the health message. Haystacks, which in all honesty are just glorified nachos or taco salad as some like to call it, are the official food of Seventh Day Adventists. I’m kidding, haystacks aren’t the official food, but they might as well should be.

My whole life I have been surrounded by everything Seventh-day Adventist. My family and friends are Adventist, I attend an Adventist church, every summer camp, bible camp mission trip was Adventist, I attended Adventist academy’s from K-12 and I even attended an Adventist college for my first year of college. Everything I had ever known had something to do with Seventh-day Adventist culture.

For many Seventh-day Adventists this is not a rare lifestyle to have; go to vespers every Friday, go to church every Sabbath, attend Adventist academy K-12, attend an Adventist University, attend grad school at Loma Linda University, meet your future Adventist spouse, get married, have kids and make them re-live that whole life style all over again, all while simultaneously eating way too many haystacks along the way. Obviously that was a little extreme and stereotypical of a typical Adventist life that I was trying to portray, but you get the picture.

My first year of college I attended a Seventh-day Adventist college and I absolutely hated it. I was attending a college surrounded by people that I had spent most of my life with, some since elementary and I felt like I wasn’t growing as a person. Some how everyone knew everybody and even if they didn’t they had heard about them, I hated that. There was no freedom to reinvent yourself, as a lot of people do in college, because most people there had known you your whole life. I got tired of the same routine and I became scared of living the same exact life that every other Adventist lives, (similar to the one I described above). I was so tired of being in Adventist culture and I desperately wanted out.

For my second year of college I transferred to a Christian University in Southern California. I always wanted to know what it would be like to attend a non-Adventist institution and see what the “outside world” was like and I was finally going to experience that.

This was the first time I was surrounded by people who had no idea who I was and to be honest it was scary going somewhere where I didn’t know a soul. Also no one knew what Seventh-day Adventism was and those who did thought it was this weird cult. My religion? A cult? I had never heard anyone tell me that. Until transferring I had never had to explain what Seventh-Day Adventism was or why I worship on the Sabbath or why I don’t eat certain things, because it was natural for everyone that I was surrounded by before to practice the same things. No one had ever questioned me about my beliefs.

Since transferring out of an Adventist college I have experienced many things, good and bad, that I don’t think I would have experienced attending an Adventist college. I have experienced being accused by a professor, in front of the whole class, of not being Christian because I’m Seventh-day Adventist, to the point where it was humiliating to have a higher figure talk down to me like that and talk down my religion. But I’ve also experienced many good things. I have had the chance to experience worship in different ways that are not typical to Adventists, I have gotten the chance to encounter many people of different religions and learn many things from them, and I have even gotten to attend my first dance, CRAZY, I know.

Even though I wanted so badly to get out of the Adventist culture I can’t help but miss it. I miss being able to go to vespers and church with my friends, I miss being able to connect with someone so easily just because you were brought up the same way, but most of all I miss the sense of community that Seventh-day Adventists have. The main reason I hated being at an Adventist college was because I hated the thought that everyone was connected in one way or another but now I’m realizing that the connection that I thought I hated was actually a sense of community that I was taking for granted. There is something about the Seventh-day Adventist community and culture that is unlike anything else and I miss it dearly. I also miss the unlimited amount of haystacks but that’s beside the point.

It took me removing myself from Adventist culture to realize just how much I love it and how important it is to me. Now that I have transferred out of an Adventist college I don’t know if this was the right decision but I do know that this is exactly where God wants me to be.

I also know that the lack of haystacks I am not eating is making me sad, but again that is besides the point.