From a Diploma to a Doctorate: Leaving High School Behind

From a Diploma to a Doctorate: Leaving High School Behind

When it comes to our lives, we are often doctoral candidates in lament but just high school students in praise. In seasons of pain, our prayers are incredibly specific, detailed, and intensely focused and lengthy. We meticulously lay out every wound and every fear, as if we were building a theology out of our own suffering. We become experts at drowning in the devil's puddle, defining blessing only by the absence of pain, and our world shrinks to the small, stagnant puddle of our problems. This reveals a dangerous belief: that the world revolves around us and our selfish happiness, putting us in control, and that God's goodness is limited to what we can see from our limited, street-level view.

In contrast, our praise is often generic and lacks depth and intensely focused and lengthy attention. We offer broad thanks for "everything You do," but rarely connect our gratitude to the specific, intricate ways God is at work. This is the heart of the battle for our soul.

Are you a soul of need, skillfully articulating your problems and demanding specific solutions, or are you a soul of praise, able to recognize God's work in both the good and the bad?

This shift to a doctorate in praise requires us to praise Him for both comfort and challenge with the same intensity and depth. This is where we stop walking down the street, seeing only what is right in front of us, and begin to see life from a helicopter view, seeing BEYOND what we can see.

We may not always understand the "why" of our circumstances, but we can trust the "who."

When we praise God in the struggle, we are saying, "I may not understand the full picture, but I trust the One who does." This is not a cry of self-confidence, but a cry of absolute dependence. It is a recognition that our understanding is limited and that our hope is not in our circumstances, but in a God who is in control of everything.

It is the move from drowning in the devil's puddle to swimming in an ocean of blessing, a life lived not by what we see or feel, but by the One in whom we trust.