My strength comes from the LORD, may He be praised forever

There once was a boy who one could charecterize as nothing but an abrasive, overachieving nerd. This was an odd charecteristic in that most nerds tended to congregate with themselves, sit in their corner, talk about their video game characters/Magic cards/schoolwork. But despite all this boys faults, he was a hard worker. If he didn't understand something, he stayed up until 3:00 in the morning working it out. When a project was coming due, he would work at it for hours on end, and make sure that it came out just right. Certainly he did his share of procrastinating, but it never really got quite so bad that it would seriously affect the quality of his work. This boy graduated from high school with a 90 average, got into every university that he applied to and, was certain about where he wanted to go.

He entered into his first year of university with all the habits of high school drilled in and with the fear of the difficulty of university driving him to work even harder at maintaining an average that would get him into law school. It was easy for him. In fact he breezed through his first year, achieving A+ in all but 3 of his courses, in which he scored As.

The boy should have realized that he got his high marks because he worked so hard. Instead he thought to himself, "Man that was easy." The following summer, however, was not so easy. Having committed to running a business that summer, he was facing a loss of 8000 dollars if he didn't do something and didn't do it fast. After pulling 16 hour days for two months and pulling the business out of the crash dive it was trending to take and turning a profit of 6000 dollars at the end of the summer, he should have felt good. Instead, he came out of that summer, $6000 richer but having acquired several nasty habits - nothing so morally terrible or physically harmful... instead habits that were bound and determined to take potshots at his academic career. And potshots they did take. Though they did not utterly destroy his record in the following year, much energy was spent in attempting to pull out of those habits (very time consuming ones) and to devote to his studies, and one course that took the brunt of the damage cost him two scholarships.

Third year came around and he was still trying to fight the habits that he had picked up that summer. The only difference between this year and the first two years however was that it was suddenly hard to get As. Procrastinated papers were suddenly not generating the quality that they used to (or at least weren't good enough to fool the TAs.) For the first time, he suddenly felt like his effort was not good enough. And though this should have motivated him to work harder, it had the opposite effect of leading him to almost give up. The only thing that kept him going was the fact that he needed to keep his marks up if he was to achieve the goal of law school, which seemed to get further and further away with each B paper that he received back from his courses.

As the third year wrapped to a close and he got back his first mark from the course to see the second B of the year on his transcript, he felt the waves of resigned defeat begin to rally at his doorstep. But something within the boy had changed. It seemed that somewhere along those past three years, the boy had slowly been maturing, tranforming, into the semblance of a man. A hard resolve instead rose up that he would not succumb to despair but would move forward, would rediscover the work ethic that had formerly existed and do what was needed to get into law school. The resolve was supported by the need, the desire to glorify God by maximizing the gift of academic ability that he had been granted.

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It stops here. The laziness. The defeat. I am not going to be steamrolled by my emotions, instead, by the power of God, I will coral those emotions and throw them right back at the forces that try to bring me down. I have not the strength to do such things, I know this now. Instead I will stand firm in my faith in God through Christ Jesus and do my best. I will do my best to make sure that my best comes out in my academic work; I will put all the strength that I have been given into discipling the men with which the LORD has entrusted me for this short time to also became disciplers of men; and through all this, I will honour God, I will desire Him above the gifts and blessings of life, and I will desire Him above life itself.

I will not waste my life but will live it to the full glory of God the Father, our only hope and strength, our provider of all things.

Praise be to the only one who is worthy of praise, our God and our LORD, forever and ever..... AMEN