Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth; and let thy heart cheer thee in the days of thy youth, and walk in the ways of thine heart, and in the sight of thine eyes: but know thou, that for all these things God will bring thee into judgment.

A Better Way to Think about college for the Christian

I’ve become disillusioned with college as a means of preparing for life. The university fails miserably in many areas: life integration, honing character, meaningful accountability, and applying disparate pieces of that education into the whole. I won’t even mention the expense and I won’t get into the indoctrination that floods the gates of the academe.

I would have avoided some student debt had I taken a different life track. I could have done better seeking a trade or vocation, like photography, or graphic design, something that certainly doesn’t require an exorbitant amount of money or time to learn.

The best approach to prepare for a family of my own would have been to seek entrepreneurship, a suggestion that only echoed in my early life from somewhere far, far away. Far away because it fell out of the status quo to reject University.  Going to University was just what people did to be somebody, whatever that meant, as defined certainly by the popular culture.

I fell into that line of thinking and now, as I grow a family of my own with my husband, I can’t say I would encourage my children to follow my footsteps.

Turning the Tide

I graduated from two top-notch universities with a Bachelor of Arts degree and a Master’s degree, respectively, and to employers, it appeared I had a lucrative resume. I had great opportunities to work with Fortune 500 companies, and colleges and Universities as well. It was a great pay-off, so I thought…

Then I got married and then I had children and then I began to read my Bible and walk more closely with the Lord and all of what I thought was the right life was indeed just vanity.

The payoff to following the track to a successful life was indeed flawed because in the end, eternally, it means nothing to God; all my good works are but filthy rags.

So my husband and I began to re-evaluate the purpose God had for us as a family with children. As mentioned in a previous post, it was time to get real with God and come face to face with a radical option which would go contrary to everything we had learned: my staying at home to raise our children on my husband’s income was worth pursuing because it has an eternal investment.

This plan, as it turned out, was indeed God’s plan. It was worth pursuing because it invests in eternity; my children’s eternity. There is a lot of value in that more than in the other options the world has to offer, those man-made constructed pursuits of unreliable and corruptible materials. Job opportunities come a dime a dozen, but educating my children in the name of Lord for the most critical times of their lives is what carried more value.

If I can go back in time, knowing what I know now, I would certainly have done things differently. Hindsight is twenty-twenty, isn’t it? How different would my decisions have been had I sought definitive wise counsel, not secular counsel, from those that relied on scripture for answers, those that could guide me in the way I should go. I grew up in a home with a family that considered prosperity a greater achievement, in which God was an afterthought, but not the center of our home. But by God’s grace, He’s equipping me to teach biblical truth to my children so they could eventually know what I never got a chance to learn at the right time.

See these links for alternatives to traditional education: AME Program, College Plus, Praxis