Reaching a Turning Point in University
who can I trust? | spiritual realizations
>University is the most difficult thing I’ve ever done! Time management was the hardest thing I found in adjusting to university. I don’t particularly like the competition either.
>University is great because there’s lots to do, and you get to meet many different people.
>Since I’ve been in university, one way I’ve changed is that I can express myself better now.
>In my first year, I went to an engineering keg party. I don’t remember what happened… I woke up the next morning with my head over a toilet. I started thinking… What or who could I trust my life with? I’d given control of my life to a substance, to alcohol. Alcohol failed me, what wouldn’t? I had tried to trust myself, but I failed me. What would sustain me?
>If you looked at the way I lived my life, I was my own god. I think the greatest idol in many people’s lives is themselves, even if they don’t realize it. They are the centre of the universe, everything revolves around them. That was me.
Selfishness and pride developed from this. I soon realized that relying on myself for security, confidence and happiness wasn’t sufficient. I was far from perfect, depraved in fact, and continually disappointed myself.
>I’ve always liked God, and have thought highly of him, but I haven’t always known who He really is. I grew up learning about God at home and church, but didn’t really understand him or know who He really is.
My journey to find my relationship with God was a process, like making a long U-turn than stopping dead in my tracks and doing a 180 degree turn.
>In my first year of university, God got my attention with two incidents that got me thinking. One was realizing I had given myself to the control of alcohol at a keg party that was a defining moment in my life.
Shortly after, I started dating this Christian girl who one day out of the blue told me we had to break up because she wanted to start taking her relationship with God more seriously, devoting herself entirely to God.
What can a guy say to that? I got dumped for God. How could I compete? I thought, "If God is so amazing that she’s willing to dump me for Him, I should check Him out a bit more."
>Through my upbringing, I was seeing how life works, and how God was involved. I had always known that I had a selfish nature, and that I offended God’s holiness, breaking relationship with Him. I had always known that Jesus died to heal that broken relationship with God. I had just never completely put the two together before. I hadn’t really known that Jesus died for me and that I needed to give myself to God, and stop living on my own.
>I have freedom. I’m relaxed because I trust that God is sovereign and in control. I’m trusting that God will provide a job for me, so that I can pay off my student loans, and move on. I have a trusting calm about this, something I would have lacked before.
>My faith has helped me appreciate what I was studying. When we look at something in class that scientists have spent years trying to figure out, with complex computer models, and experiments galore, and I sit there and think, "God made this, with the utterance of his words."
Related reading:
- Questions about spirituality? Read our spirituality articles
- What’s your Spiritual Interest Quotient? Take our SIQ quiz and find out
- How you can know God personally
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