Reinvent

It’s that time of the year; you know, when we receive flyers of stores around the world having sales on things like pencils, pens, erasers, notebooks, clothes, shoes, tissue paper, rubber cement….WAIT…ok, so I got carried away with that last one.  Anywhosal, school is starting up again; summer vacations, weekend trips to the lake, and pilgrimages to Comicon and Star Trek conventions are all memories of days past.  As a teacher, one of the school weeks I look forward to most is the first week of school.  Everyone is sporting their new outfits, their new “dos”, but most of all their new “you’s”.

We’ve all done it; maybe even every year, we buy into the belief that we can make a drastic change in our lives that will make us happier and allow people to glom onto our new personalities with happiness and joy.  What’s more than that is we do it again after Christmas vacation and dress it up as a “resolution to a new and improved me”.  If we tally it up the average teenager, from middle school through high school, will go through no less than 12 “new me’s”!!!

Adding to the pile is all our dear friends heading off to higher education….college.  I cannot count the amount of times I have heard from movies, my senior open house, and the first week of college, “College is the best time of your life.  You can reinvent yourself.  Become a new person.  Become the person you want to be.”

So what you’re saying “average people of America” is that I am not good enough just as I am or that I would be happier molding myself into something else more acceptable to other people?

What a sack of lies and deceit we spread to our youth.  We blame the media, video games, and all sorts of things on the breaking down of generations but isn’t it WE that do it to ourselves?!

I recently talked with a high school graduate that was obviously nervous about going to college.  They had heard much of the same aforementioned “words of wisdom” and asked me if I had any parting words for them.

Well, as in typical Cedric fashion, if I don’t have time ahead to really think through things I don’t always convey what I really mean.  So I said the ever-so-standby answer regarding “being yourself” and the such.  Now, however, that I have had time to mull it over a bit I would like to expound on my answer.

Sod on all that garbage you’ve heard about reinventing yourself.  Have you not heard and have you not read that you are a child of God (Jn.1:12); made in His image (Gen. 1:27).  Don’t you know that He knows the plans He made out for you. (Jer. 29:11).  So if God made you, and made you in His own image, and He knows the plans laid out for you, then why should we concern ourselves with being re-made in the images and for plans of mere people?  If we are practicing Christians shouldn’t we pray for God to lead us where His will for us is?  Shouldn’t we pray to continually be molded by God into the person He plans for us to be?

So students, my advice and prayer for you is to ardently seek God’s will for you.  Allow the will of Christ to mold you into the person He needs for His kingdom.  May any “changes/reinventing” done in your life actually be changes done by Christ Jesus according to His plans for you.  May the molding of your mind and heart be for His glory.