I’ve seen a lot of memes about debt along the lines of a bank saying you have to pay for your loans and you’re like nah, Jesus paid all my debts!

If ONLY that were true…

Sometimes I think about my student loans. The biggest amount of debt I’ve ever had. I was just paying another payment the other day. There goes more out the door, I think.

Sometimes I find myself thinking about how other people got full rides to college or they got more scholarships and grants. Why was I not smart enough? 14th in my class wasn’t enough. Getting all As my last year of high school wasn’t enough. A 3.8 GPA wasn’t enough. Why did my parents have to make just above what was the limit for qualifying for assistance? If they made any less, we would have been more financially inadequate at home, where I was staying during college.

My other options were to either not go to college at all or start at community college for “free” and then try to transfer in to the university I wanted. Knowing my record with college courses, it made me nervous to go that route. What if I bombed at community college and wasn’t good enough to then transfer out? How humiliating. Then, I wouldn’t get the scholarships I had already secured. I’d be back to square one, searching for what little I qualified for. Not being a genius, just being someone stuck in the middle of everything. Not the worst but also not the best. I wasn’t that desirable of a student academically maybe, even though I took notes on everything, showed up to class every single day unless I was so sick. That didn’t help secure a 4.0, being able to perform during exams did and I couldn’t.

Now I have this debt that I’m paying for. A debt that will one day be paid for. I wish I could accurately count down the days, but it will be years away and ever changing because I pay more than my monthly payment most months to pay it off early.

As I said, I’ve always compared my debt to someone else’s. There’s always someone who has less debt or no debt and then it makes me feel slightly better when I hear of someone with more debt than me. “It could always be worse.” Then, I have to be grateful and continue to do what I do, while also in a better mindset.

There’s another debt that I’ve thought about too. The debt of our sins.

We have so much baggage. We carry the weight of sin. It drags us down and we feel guilt and shame. Sin is what we lived in before Christ and even with Christ, sin is a part of us only because of it’s connection to flesh and the desires of our flesh. We have to constantly fight back with the Holy Spirit and lean toward Him when times get of the tempting nature.

There is nothing we can do on our own that can make us right with God. We can’t pay the debt we accumulated. We can’t pay the debt we were born into. We can’t pay the debt that we have without Christ.

We can’t compare each other’s debts because no matter how “good” we are as humans or even as Christians, we will always have a debt we can’t pay unless we become reconciled through Christ and continue to give thanks to Him.

How do you view worldly debt (monetary) and the debt that you can’t pay without Christ?

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