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Should I go to this school or not.

ServentofGod
edited December 1969 in Personal Issues
I got into a graduate school but the problem is that it is a weekend program so it will overlap with Church. I did not realize that it is a weekend program until I got accepted. The problems with this weekend program is that I will not be able to go to Mass on Sundays but I could still go to Mass on Wednesdays. Do you think that going to that school could draw me far form Christ. Please let me know your opinion as well as pray for me.

Comments

  • Unknown
    It doesn't matter when you go to church.. maybe it will benefit you more if you attend on Wednesdays.. Not everyone gets accepted to graduate school, I wouldnt decline this opportunity, and it's not even drawing you away from God. (just make Wednesdays your priority from now on)
  • grace08
    You should definately take advantage of this opportunity. Gods plan for us is to excel as much as possible in every aspect of our lives and that includes our education.  It is a blessing from God when such opportunities come our way.  Moreover you still get to go to church but on a different day, actually you might benefit more spiritually from the mass on Wednesdays as there are less people, noise and children running around. 
  • neighbor
    the way i see it, God has blessed you with this gift of being accepted into graduate school. I dont really think it matters whether you go to mass on sunday or wednesday, as long as you go! :) Maybe you need to make sure that you will definately go to mass on wednesday and not be tired or make excuses because of graduate school. i think if i was in your position, i would go only if i knew that it would not be the basis of my excuses not to attend mass (on wednesdays). Hope this helped, rabinah mahak
  • gr
    Dear ServantofGod,

    Perhaps you will find this section from Heg. Fr. Athanasius Iskander's "Practical Spirituality" useful.

    The full text is available here:

    http://stmaryscopticorthodox.ca/content/books/spirituality.pdf

    fine print from the beginning of the book:

    "A word of caution to our readers: this book is not intended to be a “do
    it yourself manual” for spirituality. So, before you start to apply what is
    written, please consult your father in  confession. Some of the exercises
    may not be suitable for you, and only your father in confession can give
    you the right advise in this regard."

    now, related to your question:

    p.73:

    DISCERNING THE WILL OF GOD:
    Sometimes one gets into a situation when he is unable to take a
    decision easily. For example, you get accepted into two universities, one
    in your home town and the other is out of town but is more famous. Or
    you have a job but you get an offer of another job in another city and
    you can’t make up your mind. It is these situations when we sometimes
    ask, “What is the will of God for me?” Knowing the will of God can be
    very difficult, but not if we follow the methods of the fathers.
    But, before we get into this, let us ask ourselves, why is it important
    for me to know the will of God?
    Saint Paul tells us in Romans 12:2, that the will of God is good, and
    acceptable, and perfect. The will of God is perfect, it lacks nothing, it
    is good for me in satisfying my spiritual, physical, psychological and
    emotional needs. God knows the future and therefore he knows what
    will be good for me in the long term.
    My own will, on the other hand, is anything but perfect. I probably
    look for benefit in the short term without considering the long term.
    And even if I wanted to consider the long term I may not be able to,
    since I cannot predict what will happen to me even next week.
    It is for these reasons that a wise person should always seek the will
    of God in whatever he does.

    But, how can I know the will of God? Theophan the Recluse tells us
    that in order for God to reveal His good, acceptable and perfect will to
    me, I have to renounce my self will. That means, I have to prove to God
    that I am really seeking His will.
    Sometimes we ask God to reveal His will to us but deep inside we
    have already made up our minds. Sometimes we seek the will of God,
    as long as it agrees with our own will. If we act in this way then God will
    not reveal His will to us.
    Theophan the Recluse gives us this “parable.”  He says, if you have
    a glass full of vinegar, and you want to put honey in that glass, you must
    first throw away the vinegar, wash the glass, put it out in the sun for a
    few hours until the smell of the vinegar disappears, and then put the
    honey in it. The vinegar here is our own will which is selfish, short
    sighted, and unlike the will of God, is not perfect, good or acceptable.
    The honey is the will of God. And, unless we bury our self will, God will
    not reveal His will to us, because we will actually be mocking God by
    asking him to reveal to us His will while our own will is already made
    up.
    How do I do this? There is an exercise for this called neutralization
    of my will. The theory is this. I always have a bias either for or against
    anything I am considering. For example, if I get an offer for a job that
    will give me more money, I may have a bias towards that job, that will
    make me blind to the bad aspects of this job. Or, I may face a situation
    in which I am asked to accept something that I don’t like, and that
    makes me overlook the many good features of that thing. These likes
    and dislikes are usually based on a first impression, that I usually re-
    enforce by ignoring the other side of the coin, and the remedy is to do
    the opposite.
    Let us take an example. I have been accepted in a good university in
    my home town, but I have an offer from another university that is far
    from home. The lure of “freedom” makes me ignore the many negative
    aspects of going to study far from home. If you really want to know
    what is the perfect, good and acceptable will of God in this matter, I
    should neutralize my bias, by intentionally identifying and even
    magnifying the negative aspects of that far away university.
    For one, I will be far from my family and friends. I will feel lonely,
    with only strangers to talk to. There is no church near that university,
    but I will have to travel for hours to find a Coptic church. I will lose my
    Father in confession, to whom I could always come for help, but who
    will be far away from me, and so on.
    Of course these negative aspects are true but you were ignoring
    them because of “freedom” away from home and parental scrutiny. Any
    one who is serious can do this exercise in a few days. The result will be
    that you will find yourself neutral to the two proposals, each one has its
    good and bad aspects.
    The same can be applied to the situation where you get an offer of
    a job that promises thousands of dollars more, but at the expense of
    taking your children away from their schools, their friends and their
    Sunday School, and moving away from your service in the Church and
    from your Father in confession.
    The first step then is to neutralize the bias by seriously identifying
    the negative aspects and giving them as much weight as the positive
    ones. Then and only then, you can go to God to ask Him to reveal His
    good and perfect and acceptable will to you.
    The next step is to go to your Father in confession and ask him to
    pray for you, so that God may reveal His will to you. This act of
    submitting yourself to your Father in confession is an act of humility, a
    very necessary pre-requisite for God revealing His will to you.
    If you feel afraid that God will chose the one option that you do not
    favour, then you have not done your home work the right way, the bias
    is still there.  And if you go to your Father in confession asking him to
    pray for you but, subconsciously, you wish that God will choose one
    option over the other, then you have not done your homework well.
    It may well be that God will actually choose the one option you
    favoured before you neutralized your will, as I will show you in the next
    example.
    A young man that I knew in Egypt before coming to Canada, wrote
    me a letter complaining that although his parents and his siblings are all
    in Canada (as immigrants), he has been consistently refused permission
    to immigrate by the Canadian embassy.
    I wrote to him telling him, maybe it is not the will of God that you
    immigrate to Canada. I then explained to him how to seek to know the
    will of God and how to neutralize his own bias in this respect. He
    accepted my advise and started thinking about the benefits of not
    immigrating to Canada.
    776
    He told his wife, if we stay in Egypt, our house will be the place
    where my parents and siblings come when they want to visit Egypt. And,
    since we have good jobs here, we don’t have to start from scratch if we
    go to Canada, writing exams only to be told that we do not have
    “Canadian experience.” We could always visit Canada and enjoy being
    with our family, and thus have the best of both worlds. They both went
    re-enforcing this until they became convinced that staying in Egypt is
    not such a bad idea after all, especially if this is the will of God for
    them.
    In his next letter he wrote me, “The same day we felt free from the
    bias and it didn’t matter anymore for us whether we immigrate or stay
    in Egypt, was the day we received a telephone from the Canadian
    embassy telling us we were approved and have to do the medicals in
    order to receive our visas. 
    The beauty about doing this exercise, is that every time you are faced
    with the same situation, you go back to the same routine. It will be very
    easy for you not to think too much about what you ought to do, but
    rather neutralize or “bury’ your will so that the perfect, good and
    acceptable will of God may be revealed to you. 
    There are some words of caution that I would like to tell you. Do not
    try to cheat!  Sometimes we seek the will of God but when God reveals
    His will to us, we don’t like it. Some people would go to another priest
    hoping that changing the priest may change the will of God!
    The other problem is that we ignore the will of God completely and
    seek our own will, just praying to God to give us what we want. This can
    be disastrous especially in the matter of marriage.
    The late Bishop Poemen of blessed memory once told me a story
    about a young man who always came to the Bishop because of marital
    problems with his wife. One day the Bishop in frustration asked him,
    “Have you prayed at all before marrying this girl?” and the man told
    him, “I prayed everyday for six months!” The Bishop asked him, “What
    did you say to God?” The man said, I said, “God please let me marry
    this girl!”
    Accepting the will of God as the best option for me, is a difficult
    concept for many young people. One young woman told me once, “I
    will accept the will of God in every thing except for marriage!” And I
    asked her Why? She said, “Because I know that the will of God will be
    that I marry a deacon who teaches in Sunday School who will be boring much about what you ought to do, but
    rather neutralize or “bury’ your will so that the perfect, good and
    acceptable will of God may be revealed to you. 
    There are some words of caution that I would like to tell you. Do not
    try to cheat!  Sometimes we seek the will of God but when God reveals
    His will to us, we don’t like it. Some people would go to another priest
    hoping that changing the priest may change the will of God!
    The other problem is that we ignore the will of God completely and
    seek our own will, just praying to God to give us what we want. This can
    be disastrous especially in the matter of marriage.
    The late Bishop Poemen of blessed memory once told me a story
    about a young man who always came to the Bishop because of marital
    problems with his wife. One day the Bishop in frustration asked him,
    “Have you prayed at all before marrying this girl?” and the man told
    him, “I prayed everyday for six months!” The Bishop asked him, “What
    did you say to God?” The man said, I said, “God please let me marry
    this girl!”
    Accepting the will of God as the best option for me, is a difficult
    concept for many young people. One young woman told me once, “I
    will accept the will of God in every thing except for marriage!” And I
    asked her Why? She said, “Because I know that the will of God will be
    that I marry a deacon who teaches in Sunday School who will be boring
    to live with!” I told her, “Can’t God choose for you a deacon who
    teaches in Sunday School who will be fun to live with?”
    Another young man who attended a retreat where we spoke about
    the will of God in my marriage, stood up objecting violently to what I
    was proposing. He told me, “When it comes to marriage, I want to be
    the master of my own destiny!” I told him in response, “If you ignore
    the will of God in the process of choosing your spouse, you will become
    the master of your own disaster!”
    I like to give to our young people this parable; your life is like a boat
    where two people have to work, one has to row and the other has to
    hold the rudder (the device that directs the boat to turn right or left).
    A wise person would hand the rudder to the Lord and say, “Lord, hold
    the rudder and I will row!” Unfortunately, many times we insist on
    holding the rudder and we want God to row! 
    One benefit of accepting the will of God as your preferred option is
    that, whatever life brings your way, you will have no fear, knowing that
    if God willed this for me, it is certainly good, perfect and acceptable,
    even if -in the short term-I don’t like it.

    ... prayers,

    /gr
  • Unknown
    Really it doesnt matter which day you qo to church as lonq as you qo.  u noe wat i am saying?

    anyways, def.  go to the school as loonq as u qo to church on another day every week.  I mean if you miss a week because of somethinq ohkay thats fine.  but keep it as a priority. 

    +mahraeel+
  • ServentofGod
    Thanks for all the support.  Pray for me.
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