Saint Augustine Vs. My Own Personal Experience

So while listening to lecture last week, I was reminded of a situation that happened at work. I work at a high school in Missouri City with a program called AVID. It is designed to help students get into college and bring up their grades. I tutor the students and we go on college tours and fill out college applications, FAFSA, and prepare them for the SAT. A majority of the students come from underprivileged families, which means most of them can be hard to handle at times. There had never been any problems on any of the college tours and usually we keep the kids in a hotel overnight. Well last October our seniors went to Dallas to visit Baylor, North Texas, and UT- Arlington. It was during the State Fair and there were a lot of “weird” looking people staying at the hotel we stayed at. Well the second night we were there, some of the girls decided to ask a couple of older guys that were staying at our hotel for some alcohol. Now these guys were guys that I would look at and say, “ummmm I’m scared. Let’s go right now.” The girls got caught and got sent to an alternative school. These girls were not bad girls at all. They all played a sport, they were all seniors, and they all had full ride scholarships to a college. The opportunity was there, however, so they felt they had to take it. It wasn’t the drinking that pleased them, it was the thought of breaking the rules and not getting caught that they loved. Just like St. Augustine says in book 2, chapter 8 paragraph 16, “ but my pleasure lay not in the pears: it lay in the evil deed itself, which a group of us joined in sin to do.” This quote is exactly what the girls were thinking. If a group of them did it, they would be seen as so cool for getting away with it. Like I said, they were not bad girls and most people that sin are not “bad” people, they just do things for the pleasure of sinning. God set rules to keep people in order. If there were no rules then there would be nothing but chaos. I doubt that the only reason God made up rules was to keep people happy. Rules are not what make people happy. The order that the rules bring about keep the people happy. The girls on the AVID trip were pretty happy with themselves that night before they got caught. If they would not have gotten caught, they would have been bragging to everyone in school about it the next day. However, once they knew they were going to be in trouble for going against the rules, their attitude completely changed. The funny thing is, they were trying to blame everyone else except themselves for what happened. People are always going to sin because of the pleasure they feel that they will get from it but that does not make it right.