Being a Christian Student on the Campus – every moment we can choose to love the Lord!

How do we balance the Christian life and church life with our student life? I too was wondering what’s the answer to this question. As students, I think, we all go “through this tunnel” and we all “cross this bridge”. Sometimes I struggle between trying to figure out whether I should go to the meetings, the Bible studies, etc. or whether I should stay home and study. I realized in a recent fellowship with a sister that we need to consider how do we love the Lord, how Satan hinders us from loving Him, how can we use our time wisely, and how can we BE in what we’re doing.

A lot of what was shared with me was simple and sweet. “Can we love the Lord only in the meetings?” “Can we enjoy the Lord only in the meetings?” No matter where we are, we can enjoy Him and we can love Him. A hymn came up in our fellowship; “In moments like these I sing out a song, I sing out a love song to Jesus. Singing I love You, Lord.” It doesn’t say in moments ‘in the meetings’ or moments ‘at the Bible study’… it just says moments like ‘these’ – indicating that we can love the Lord no matter where we are and what we are doing. Every moment is a good moment to tell the Lord you love Him. Every moment we can choose to love Him. If you must stay home to study or work on a project, we have to learn to love the Lord there in our room while working on our project. The Lord is always with us in our spirit, so we can touch Him, experience Him, love Him, enjoy Him, experience Him, talk to Him, pray to Him, taste Him, eat Him, drink Him, and live by Him in our tiny, tiny dorm room.

What we also need to realize is that Satan can use even good things or spiritual things to hinder us from getting to the Lord. We know that studying isn’t a bad thing. The Lord wants us to get a good education. He also wants us to go to the meetings and to have Bible studies and be with others to love Him. But we need to look at how we spend our time and see if we spend it wisely. Sometimes we have no problem giving up the meetings to study, but what about 2 hours of the computer to study, what about 2 hours of TV to study? It’s not so easy to give these little things up, but if we so then we could go to the meetings and enjoy the Lord there.

A lot of what it comes down to is how we use our time. Sometimes I find myself not doing school work when I have free time and then stay home from a meeting to do it then. When really, we all have time to do both, we just don’t schedule our time wisely! If we are having trouble balancing church life and school life and all that comes with that, maybe we should look at all that we do in a day… I don’t think we can say that the church life is too demanding – there are 168 hours in a week; the church life only requires let’s say 2 hours for a prophesying meeting and 2 hours for the table on Lord’s day, 1 hour for the prayer meeting, maybe two 2 hour home meetings in the week, or a Christian student on the campus time. That’s about 9-10 hours out of your entire week. That means that the church life requires only 5% of your time in a week. This is definitely not too much and we should be able to be in the meetings if we can schedule our time accordingly.

Lastly when we go to the meetings – go to the meetings and be in the meetings. Sometimes we realize we should go, or the Lord is telling us to go, but when we get there we sit in our chairs thinking about all that we have to do when we get home… and we miss the meeting. When we go, go! Don’t go there to be worried about your studies and your tests, your essays or assignments back at home. The same if you stay home and you miss the meeting in order to study – you need to study! Don’t worry about missing the meeting. Enjoy the Lord before you start and then focus to get your work done. In these ways we honor the Lord by loving Him.

[sharing from a sister Christian student on the campus in UT Arlington, Texas, USA, from her experience of balancing the Christian life / the church life with the demanding student life. Read other testimonies on this topic via, Being a Christian Student on the Campus. Do YOU want to share your testimony concerning this? Write to us at, [email protected]. Picture source: UT Arlington, Maverick Activities Centre]