Religion & Spirituality

What I think God has taught me and why I’m not in school

What I think God has taught me and why I’m not in school

I remember attending a Christian event at the university and the pastor who was so good at his previous architecture job that he got hired to design the local cancer wing of the hospital, told us he quit his architectural job because his job was a dog eat dog time of position where everybody was always competing and trying to short change everybody else.

This year, I dumped a friend of mine who was gorgeous and rich and helped me with many things because she was so competitive and always tried to elevate herself at my expense. She would mock me for not being able to do the things she was able to do cause it made her feel intelligent. And she would tell me my clothes were ugly cause it made her feel attractive and beautiful.

When I was in university professors were taught to limit the number of people who get A’s in their classes so everything was a competition where you always had to prove you were better than everybody else. I became militantly obsessed with my grades and would get clinically depressed for 3 days if I failed to outshine even my closest friends when grading season came in. I later met a woman from a club I was in who was more successful than me and I felt jealous and almost viewed her as evil simply because she was successful.

However, while academic success requires competitive superiority over your peers, religious success involves submission and humility and modesty. I believe God wanted to reprogram me from my competitive instinct and this is why He kept me in limbo after I finished school and had no idea what my purpose was. I still struggle to celebrate when others have advantages I don’t but I’m improving.

I believe that Jesus said those who want to be great must serve and those who wish the first must be last and slave to all. As a young person of 18 which was almost half my life ago, I had a brilliant vocabulary and wrote better poems and short stories than Shakespeare. I also had an amazing memory where I could memorize more pages than a Yale Graduate Student but due to my extreme immaturity and psychological disorders, I failed to excel in academics during my first attempt at a bachelors degree.

At my second attempt, I had been severely compromised intellectually but got straight A’s in my last 3 years and raised my cumulative GPA from a D- to a B. Just because I had developed a keener spiritual awareness and emotional intelligence through my religious absorption. But I was competitive and occasionally socially defunct, which is why God had to deprogram me.

If you want to be beautiful you must see beauty in others. If you want honour, you must honour others. If you want respect, you must respect others. If you want inclusion, you must include others. If you want acceptance, you must accept others.

What I think God has taught me and why I’m not in school
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