Take Your Planner Out of the Bible’s Place.

If you are a college student, you probably just survived two weeks of life in the library running on Starbucks double shots and surrounded by open books. Midterms week is no joke, and it is yet another of the many demanding parts of college life that is our normal. To be a college student is to be a busy creature. There’s the coffee dates, hanging out with your friends, going to different club events, and after all that activity, everybody needs time to blow off steam at the gym, or maybe even eating chocolate chip pizza and watching Netflix in their dorm room.With all the endless entries in our planners, things fall through, you juggle a lot of balls, and if you are like me and you’ve taken on too many, one of those balls has to drop. Whether you realize it or not, you choose the one that drops. It is the one that is least important to you.It’s a struggle when you have to choose between a lot of good activities, but if you don’t stop juggling such a large number of activities, you are going to be half-performing them all. Colossians 3:23 says, “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters.” Can you really give all your effort to each ink mark in a planner so full of activities and obligations that your head spins?This is something I have personally struggled with. I like to say “yes.” I like to be involved in it all. I find myself chronically late, unprepared, and most importantly, not thinking about anything except how to pull my day off. The enemy uses this place of distraction to keep us from thinking about what is really important in life: our relationship with the Lord.We are not on this Earth to see who can build their resume the most impressively or stack the most meetings into one day. We are here to be a representation of Jesus Christ with our whole lives. Jesus took time to be alone with the Father, away from His busyness.I think this is hard, but how else do you notice the person crying that needs to be reached out to? How else do you get to really dig into the word and hear what the Lord has to speak over your life for the day? The Lord wants to be at the forefront of our consciousness, and sometimes to do that, things have to be erased.What in your life is bringing the Lord the most glory? What activities line up with the direction you feel like the Lord is calling you? What needs to go?We, the college students, the endlessly busy and running around, are at a unique place. We are surrounded by fellow ambitious, passionate, people who are going to launch out to different careers and places across the world. This is a pivotal time; a time with so much potential.Let us not miss out on what the Lord wants to do where we are because we are too busy.words by Savannah Cooper and photo by Kate Bartley