Dear Midterms,

I know the lie you want me to believe. You want me to believe that you are the only thing that matters. You want all my time and all my effort, and you’re hoping you have the power to determine my happiness. You acknowledge that I am intelligent, but you’re trying to find every way possible to make me feel the complete opposite of that. Well, midterms, guess what? Jesus is better than you, and you don’t have that power.

My grades, any test, or even you, midterms, don’t define me. It’s the lie that you and even some of our professors try to convince us of. When I acknowledged that I was created by the God of the universe, I begin letting Him define me. Even though you tried to convince otherwise, He had engraved the truth in my heart. He reminded me that your hold on me is microscopic in light of His. If the creator of the world and everything in it created me too, then you have absolutely no right to make me feel dumb.

You don’t deserve all my time. I will not allow my life to be swallowed by you whole. You don’t deserve my life, Jesus does. I’m not going to stop the things I’m doing to circulate my life around you. Certainly, I will study for you. God placed me here to be a student and work hard for His glory, but I will not give every ounce of time I have to you and none to Him. I trust that our God is so good, He will never punish me for spending time with Him.

Lastly, I don’t hate you, midterms. I actually adore you. I feel set apart by God to be a college student working toward a major, so that I may eventually give glory to Him through my job. I want you to know that every second I spend studying for you is so that I may be able to be a good worker for God and not to just get a good grade on you. When I don’t study for you with that mentality, it feels pointless, and it should feel pointless. You’re not the center of my life, and you are not worthy of taking my eyes off of Him. You are distant in comparison to who He is. Jesus won’t care what grade I received on you when I get to Heaven. What He will cherish is the time and effort I put into working toward HIS glory through my education.

So this is for you, midterms,

Colossians 3:23-24

²³ Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters, ²⁴ since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving.