Learning In Wartime

I have read a few books by Shane Claiborne, and I usually think while I am reading them that maybe I should give up everything, sell all my stuff, and simply live as the first Christians did. I wonder how I can possibly be spending so much time and money at a place like Calvin College when there is a huge world out there that is desperate for Jesus. I know that Christ told us that He would come again like a thief in the night, and I wonder if he finds me pulling an all-nighter studying for an exam, would He say I was faithfully waiting for Him? I really appreciated this article by C.S Lewis because it answered questions that were permanently begging to be asked deep in the back of my brain.

Lewis says, "One's life, after conversion, would inevitably consist in doing most of the same things one had been doing before: one hopes, in a new spirit, but still the same things." Alot of times we think that the lives of Christians should be much, much different than the lives of others. And we should be different- but we still have to eat, we still have to drink, we still have to sleep. If we are called to it, we still might even have to study. Lewis goes on to say that, "all our merely natural activities will be accepted, if they are offered to God, even the humblest: and all of them, even the noblest, will be sinful if they are not." Often we focus on the last part of that sentence, the part that relates to total depravity. But what about the first part? A shower, working out, eating lunch can be a humble offering to God? I have not thought of it this way. If we shower and exercise, not for a flat belly or to for our appearance to others, but because our body is God's temple then yes, these can be offerings to God. If we eat and sleep in order to serve Him more energetically rather than because we are gluttonous or lazy, then I believe He is honored.

I sometimes thought that these were all selfish things, including studying. I thought that my reading that wasn't for school, reading like good novels, or random other books that I read purely for interest, were all selfish wastes of time. But these are things in which I pursued learning for the sake of learning, as Lewis put it in “Our English Syllabus”. I hope and pray that I might approach my studies in this way, or the way Lewis states it in this article, “the pursuit of knowledge and beauty, in a sense for their own sake, but in a sense which does not exclude their being for God’s sake.” His answer to my question is that being at Calvin is where God has placed me now, and as long as I offer my act of studying up as a humble offering to God, He will be honored.