The lights go down, the families hug, friends cry and promise to keep up with each other. Finally, the day is over and you sleep a happy graduate, but what then? A final big summer before you are an official adult? Every moment becomes bittersweet and you do not want to waste it.

The last small group at church will come soon. The last time in a youth anything. Eventually, you are doing things for the last time. The last swim. The last time you will sleep in your own bed seven days a week. The last time you see your best friend on close to a daily basis. You become excited, but in the end, sad as well. Soon it hits July and everything seems to be happening as fast as you can breathe.

Everyone thinks it's all exciting leaving home and growing up, but the security blanket of doing the same thing for seven years is gone. It is something you have never done and the people you have spent your whole life growing up with are now gone. It becomes so scary that you do not know what to do with yourself. You just sit around and do everything you can as fast as you can. Even with this in mind we forget to enjoy ourselves we work all summer and forget the friends that we will never see again after this summer.

We all quickly become distracted with orientations, senior trips and trying to have the "best summer ever." So distracted that we actually forgot to include each other in these summer plans. We are so scared of wasting this last summer that this is exactly what we are doing wasting final moments.

Wasting the last youth camp or the last youth activity to prove you can be wild and free on this last summer as a juvenile. We have been wasting so much just because it is the summer of graduation. We have become the kids we promised not to be like. The kids we read articles about and swore never to repeat their mistakes. We have become the next class to forget promises and move on to bigger more fun things, forgetting to cherish the past.

For instance, we all did that whole Project Graduation thing where they tell us we are all one going in different directions and it made us feel excited, yet sad, but we were going to be the class that kept in touch, remember? Well, just like every class before us that said this we were wrong. We all quickly dropped the people we were only friends with because we saw them every day and lost touch before we ever had the chance to have one last night under the stars. Their little note became true faster than we all said goodnight to each other at the end of it.

So as this summer comes to a close make a change, do a youth event and call a friend from your first period. Do not let this last bit of summer slip by you. Take the bittersweet moment and let it be you because the more you do with family and friends this summer the less it stings when you have no choice but to leave.