The depravity that surrounds the students here desensitizes them. Their hearts have numbed to sin through prolonged exposure like dead, frostbitten limbs. Unfortunately, a dead soul does not catch the eye like rotting flesh. Otherwise we might have more urgency. However, sin is not the only metaphysical reality that the secular world conditions students to ignore.

Emphasis on self reliance distracts my students from reliance on God. At Tulane, parents, professors, advisors, and employers establish steps for the students long before they come due. Practicality aside, pinning down every detail of the future models to the students the lie that the future is theirs. They mirror the model that they see from their authorities, which leads them to focus so much on what is coming that they forget about what is. Further, their imaginary futures become so real that disruptions to them are unthinkable. At the outset, they never give Christ the chance to work in their lives beyond the limits of their plans.

Largely, my students neither rely on God nor have reason to feel like they should. Unlike their real plans, they discuss reliance on God with academic detachment. They nod along reverently to excerpts from the Sermon on the Mount, parroting platitudes like an executive reading a press release. The words are spoken and forgotten as soon as the cameras stop rolling.

Of course God expects us to look forward. After all, He gives us the faculties to do so. However, there is a distinction between scouting the future and living in it. It is a deception to believe that we control the future. That deception provides us with a false sense of security that never leads us to put anything real into God’s hands until we have no other choice. “Trust in God” rings hollow when said as a last resort. Disruption and uncertainty are facts of life that modern luxury has prompted us to forget, and the inability to respond when things do not go according to plan is on display here at all times.

In Bible study, we discussed God’s instruction to Abram to look at the stars. At that time, God said that their number would mirror that of his offspring. Some scholars said that God gave the instruction during the day (Genesis 15:12). In that case, Abram would have realized that God expected him to trust the presence of stars that he knew existed but could not see. God’s plan for Him was more real than the stars, but that plan would not materialize until he trusted God to enact it.

My students will not fully rely on God in one moment. Perhaps prayer is a start. Rather than an upheaval, prayer is an entrustment to God of a small portion of time for a use that a person cannot fully comprehend or quantify. Even if He does not yet have their lives, I am confident with what He can do with a few of their minutes.

Admittedly, I did not pray or trust God with my life until He showed me that I had no control over it. Through prayer, I eventually saw that He had been speaking to me all along. I was just too busy planning to hear Him.

Deo Gratias.