The school years are supposed to be the best years of your lives.
Which is quite a depressing thought if you think about it. Imagine you’re 14, lots of pressure in school, you have bad skin, you can’t get a girlfriend or a boyfriend and you don’t wear the right clothes or look the right way.
And these are the best years of our lives?!
There are certainly people reading this who don’t have to imagine. For you your teenage years are horrible. You might be going through some really horrible stuff right now. You look around and everyone seems to have it better.
Better clothes. Better skin. More confidence around the opposite sex. Smarter. Faster. Thinner.
And when you are constantly comparing yourself to other people you inevitably will focus on things about yourself that fail in comparison. But here’s a secret. We all do it. You’re not unusual. We all think everyone else is better off.
And sometimes when we do that, it leads us to go and look for who we are in the wrong places. Being yourself doesn’t make you feel good so you look to drugs, or sex or porn, or to dieting.
But ultimately none of those things will show you who you are.
But there is good news.
Because wherever you are right now does not have to be the best there is for you. So many people go through their school years afraid that this is it.
But it’s hard to know exactly who you are when you are fourteen. You might not have discovered yet who it is you were created to be. And you were created to be something. Something incredible. Something amazing.
God didn’t create you as an after thought. He created you with something amazing in mind. God doesn’t see your school years as all there is. He sees everything for what it will make you.
When we are in a place where we understand that God created us very specifically and for more than just our school years, it helps us to put our trust in something bigger and better.
It helps us remember that there is more than the now.
When David was a young boy he was the smallest of his brothers. He must have compared himself to everyone and wished he was stronger and fitter.
But God chose him to defeat Goliath.
God doesn’t always see what we see. The things that we wish were different about ourselves God views as things that aren’t finished yet.
Don’t compare yourself to other people because God certainly doesn’t.
And when you trust that God got it right with you, you’ll not be so worried that your teenage years is all there is.
Because it isn’t.
Not by a long way.