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So you are away in college. You're on your own now and there is
no one to tell you what to do! If you want to stay out all night,
you can do so-your parents don't know! If you want to drink until
you get wasted, have at it-who's going to tell? What if you don't
feel like going to class? Don't go, after all you need the sleep.
Besides if the professor doesn't take roll, who will know the difference?
You are an adult now. You are in control of your own life, so why should
you bother about doing anything that you don't feel like doing, especially
going to Church?
Think about this for a minute. Are freedom and
adulthood all about doing your own thing? When people get to that level
where they only do what they want to do, what usually is the result?
For instance, most of you young college students who are away from home for
the first time often find yourselves with an unbelievable degree of liberty.
For most of your seventeen or eighteen years at home, you lived under the
thumbs of parents, relatives, teachers, etc. Now things are different.
No one is making you clean your room. No one is making you go to bed, or
eat food that you don't like. No one stops you from playing before you
finished your homework. You watch whatever you want to on television, and
no one is there to force you to get up on Sunday morning when you have
spent Saturday night in the streets!
The longer you stay in school, however, you start to notice something.
There is a price to pay if you don't go to class. Your friend's notes
were not as good as they should have been, so you missed some important
information that was on the test! You can't really believe that you
said and did the things that attribute to you, but since you were too
drunk to remember it, you'll just have to wonder about it. You didn't
have to sneak to have sex or fool around, you only had to make sure
your roommate was away, but you didn't plan on getting pregnant or
catching a disease. The syllabus that the professor handed out at the
beginning of the semester, when everything seemed such a long way off,
well now it's all due next week! "Where did the time go?" you ask.
And why does your room smell so bad? You remember now that you once had
an aversion to filth! And as far as Church goes, well "God understands,"
you find yourself saying with more frequency.
The fact is that these years are a time for you to put into practice
what you have learned about being a wholesome person. You are entering
the responsibility zone. The stakes have changed for you. Before, if
you made a mistake, mom or dad was there to get you out of it. Now it
is up to you. Can you do it? Only if you want to! To want to do it
is to want to do whatever it takes to do it.
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