I live in a college town, we have a huge university with over 26,000 students. Graduation was a couple weeks back and most of the town put up special signs and marquees congratulating the recent graduates.
I saw one that said “You earned your degree, now the world is your oyster.”
I’ve heard this phrase dozens of times in my life, however I have never really known exactly what it meant…so like anything your curious about…you Google it. This phrase means, “You are in a position to take everything the word has to offer.”
I thought on this for a while and it started to bug me a bit. The word has plenty to offer but do I really want to take it? Is that the message I want to send my kids? I’m sure people who say it do so just out of admiration of something achieved but I started thinking what kind of message do I want to send to my children, what do I want them to go after in life?
My answer ended up being pretty simple…I want them to go after Jesus. I want them to seek Jesus. I want them to take everything HE has to offer.
I began thinking about the pearl in an oyster. Once at Disney I did the touristy thing where you pay a diver to go down in a tank to fish out an oyster and then you open it to get a pearl. It was fun vacation thing to do, along with it we learned all about how pearls are formed in oysters…
Sand and sediment slip into oysters causing pain and distress to the oyster’s system, so to take this pain away the oysters use minerals—that God naturally created within them—to coat the debris and a pearl is formed.
Trash that causes pain is healed and transformed to beauty through something God provides…
Wow, God turns pain to beauty within the oyster.
That…that is what I want to teach my children. I want them to know that God lives inside them because of Jesus, I want them to know because of Jesus all the pain causing debris that the world throws at them can be turned into something beautiful because of Jesus.
Instead of teaching them the world is their oyster, I will be teaching them Jesus is their pearl.