By Rachel Higginbotham

 Five years ago, I slept in a dorm, ate in a cafeteria, worked in a college office, spent as much time on the free and plentiful, wifi points as I did studying and thought life was a wee bit stressful. The Lord must have a bright and beautiful sense of humor within His boundless love and mercy to see a future for college kids like I once was. Most will say it is a certain amount of drama laced with a spirit of invincibility that gives college freshmen their well deserved reputation.

I was such an unstoppable force in college that it took three years of questionable performance and the wisdom of two parents who refused to co-sign anymore loans before I realized that, with my current methods, I was not going to make it through in a manner that honored my Lord and Savior.

It is so irritating to have to stop something right before its completion. With debt, 85 or so college credits and no degree, I entered the workforce in 2005 with a bunch of high schoolers trying to compete for at least 30 hours at minimum wage so I could pay the loans from the last 3 years. I had no car and no way to live on my own — talk about one step forward and 67 steps back. I felt like crawling under a rock in shame unitl the world forgot I was a college dropout.

Sometimes, there are lessons in life that God intends for us to learn before we go any further, and no amount of running against the wall, trying to push through, is going to budge the Creator of the Universe. I was against a wall—blind to what I had to do, learn or realize to go forward—and nothing to go back to that would have made me a light in the darkness for Christ. Rather, I felt as if, in my failure, the darkness was coming from me. There was nothing to show for my efforts, plenty of disappointment from those I loved and an enormous amount of self-disappointment and loathing.

We all sin and fall short of the Glory of God. Somehow I figured, in my youth and zeal, that I was going to give that part of life a pass. How much greater must the shame of Adam and Eve have been? Or the dispair of Judas? Or the grief of King David upon being confronted with his sins? And my greatest failre was not making the grade in accounting, twice.

The impact of sin in our lives may be little or great, but the magnitude does not change the nature of the beast. Our fallen nature gives us only once choice, and that is to crawl under that rock and die. Christ gives us another choice. His Grace is an outstretched hand, ready to pull us through our lessons in life.

What I learned is that it is in His time that life flows, and no amount of stubborn will stop the passage, and no amount of zeal will speed it up. For me, the degree will come later, but what wisdom have I been given from having to work myself out of a hole of debt! I have the blessing of taking my degree in hand next year knowing the industry I want to work within, and what it means to pay bills every month. God knew that, in order for me to become what He intended for me, I needed to walk that path, and learn that lesson before graduation. Blessed be the name of the Lord.