Congratulations on successfully completing year 12 and entering the world of tertiary education. In a real sense tertiary education is your ticket into the world. American business tycoon Roger Babson once observed, “Opportunities are greater today than ever before in history. Young people have greater chances for health, happiness, and prosperity than had the children of any previous generation.” Opportunity is knocking, the global village offers those of you who are lucky enough to have been born in the west an unprecedented chance to prosper.

I remember though, when I started at Uni, everything seemed so complicated and everyone around me so confident about where they were going. I remember wandering around the Monash Uni campus blindly wondering who to talk to and have lunch with. Even though there are literally thousands of people on campus it is easy to find yourself alone and unsure.

The good news is that before long you will meet new people and begin to make new friends. It really is a whole new chapter of your life. (I guess you’ve probably been told all this enough before and are wondering what it is that I’m getting at.) The reason I am writing to you is twofold. Firstly, I just want to wish you a great year as you settle into your new course and as you get used to a bit more freedom.

My concern, however, is that many young people, when they start out at Uni, lose the plot. You will find that people who have never experienced total freedom before will suddenly want to experiment with all sorts of new things that are available to them. Being 18 means you can drive which means you have greater mobility, it means you’re allowed to buy and consume alcohol and it also means your parents have less legal control over what you do and who you become.

So now it’s up to you! I remember there were times when I felt like a real square at Uni because it seemed everyone around me was experimenting with drugs and with their sexuality. People, some of them my friends, told me I was silly to not join in. To them my morals and Christian stance only held me back from having fun. And I have to say that at times I wondered if they were right.

These same pressures are going to assault you as you begin tertiary studies and as you meet new people. What is it that is important to the Christian? Well, it’s life itself. The fact that humans push God away and do their own thing is very evident when you get to Uni. For example, God’s word asks us to maintain our virginity until we get married because it leads into a more secure marriage bond. It is the best way to live life with the least amount of relational pain. It may seem at times that Christianity is a kill joy religion, but time tells the true story. I would like to leave you with a short story. It is a true story about a good friend of mine.

Adam and I went through Scotch together. He was a good-looking guy with a great personality and a fun attitude towards life. Adam was pretty clever and if he applied himself could’ve grabbed at several good opportunities for a successful life. Towards the end of year 12 he dropped out of school because of family problems, but also because he was lazy and just wanted to have fun. He spent the next two years working part time and doing night classes so that he could finish year 12 and go to Uni. He began a chef’s apprenticeship in this time and then after six months dropped out.

Finally Adam got into Latrobe Uni; he began an Arts degree, but his social life was too important to him and he consequently dropped out. The thing with Adam was that when you talked to him it was never his fault that he kept starting and dropping out of things. It was everybody else’s fault. Either the restaurant he was working for or the University lecturer. I used to love hanging out with Adam. He was good fun. He used to knock me a lot though, saying that my faith was rubbish and that all it did was restrict the fun of life.

Well, last August I went to Adam’s funeral. It was a shock to hear that Adam had died of a heroin overdose and not only that but it had been an intentional suicide. Adam wrote a note explaining that he couldn’t cope with life and its complexities. (I’m not telling you this because I think you’re going to end up anything like Adam, the important part is next.) At Adam’s funeral I wondered to myself what more I could have done to stop Adam from taking his own life. I guess everyone at the funeral was probably thinking the same thing.

After the funeral Adam’s girlfriend, his latest one who I hadn’t met yet, came up to me. She said; “Are you Andrew Jones?” I told her yes. Then she smiled up at me and said “I just want to thank you for being Adam’s friend.” I thought that was a funny thing for her to do, she didn’t even know me. But she went on to tell me how much Adam had admired my life, my beliefs and my determination to serve God. I was amazed. I had always felt deep inside that even though Adam and I were good buddies he had always thought I was a bit of a loser. It was such an encouragement to me to realize that even when Adam took his own life because he didn’t think it was worth living he felt that my life was.

“So what?” you ask. “What does that have to do with me?” Well, the test begins now. The test to discover who you really are and what you are going to do with your life. Being a person of integrity becomes more difficult, so you need to ask yourself what you believe and why. And as you search and if you find the truth, then you need to be proactive about that before the world you’re moving into swallows you up.

The best way to maintain your relationship with Jesus is to learn more about him, so you can live life better and explain to people why you’re different. The best setting to do that in is with a bunch of other Christians. So let me encourage you to keep coming to church, to keep going to O18s and to most of all keep reading your Bible.

An Illustration: In January this year I went to Tasmania with my wife. On a couple of days we went and visited underground caves. These caves are apparently all over Tassie. The second cave we went to was long and thin. It is an amazing experience to walk down into the earth and find caverns where stalactites and stalagmites have been steadily growing for thousands of years. As we wondered on we came to a thin passage that the tour guide told us had resisted the occasional overweight tourist. The passage continued through to a high roofed narrow cavern and then ended abruptly at a handrail. Past the handrail the floor dropped away to another cave forty metres below. I asked the tour guide what was down there. He said the caves riddled the area and that down below there was a small cave. If you put your ear to the wall though he told me you could hear water flowing. The whole thing ignited my sense of adventure. I asked the guide whether he knew of nearby caves. He pointed to the nearest wall and said to me, “You never know, just through two feet of that stone there might be the world’s biggest and most beautiful cave.”

As I went away from that place and reflected on how explorers might be able to be better discover the caves in the area I was struck with the similarity to life’s search. The vast majority of us spend our entire lives following the paths that others have set before us. We travel to the banister and stare down into the dark and then turn around and follow everyone else back to the familiar realms. Its true, opportunity is knocking at your life in a way it never knocked before. I think the real challenge is to maintain true personal integrity and to conduct life as a search for those things which are true and good rather than following everyone else into the money grubbing, career hungry paths that the average person aspires to. I believe in God and in his Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. I call him Lord because I have given the control of my life over to him. I regularly ask God to help keep me from the boredom of the rat race and to lead me into new caverns, to reveal himself to me through a life that may in the end be more difficult and less cushy but which in the end will be worth living.

Andrew Jones