Here at Western, a new quarter is upon us. There is a bubble of excitement which begins to creep up as people prepare for new classes. Students wait with anticipation to see what this new time of learning will hold. The air is electrified with a thrill for knowledge.
There is a heaping helping of whining.
For those who don't know, I've moved back into the dorms for this, my last year as an undergrad at Western. I try not to rag on my younger "housemates" too often, but in this case I need to face facts, those facts being that freshmen are very, very, good at complaining, particularly about the classes they don't want to take. As many of us remember, the early years of college are rife with courses which are required of us, but that we have no real interest in. During my time working the front desk, I sit in the midst of a veritable hurricane of lamentations about how horrible it is that someone has to take *insert name of class here*. Before I go any further, let me say that I know your pain. GEO 101. I've been where you are. I'm here for you.
The fact that I'm old now (in college student thinking), however, has made it so that I don't have to deal so much with taking undesirable courses. My left hook o' credits knocks out most of my competition, and as such, I'm left looking to other areas of my life to find things that I don't like to learn. Why do I spend my time actively looking for things that I don't like, one might be wondering? Because the things we are least excited to examine have just as much to teach us as the things which we absolutely love.
Par exemple, I love me some Jesus. Based on this, I really enjoy learning more about Him. Naturally, I'm drawn towards things that allow me to learn more about who Jesus was, why He did the things He did, and how His life and death effect the way I am to live today.
On the other hand, I don't so much like learning about hard sciences. Admittedly, I'm picking something from kind of a long list of things that I don't like to learn about, but there it is. I find that hard sciences leave starkly little room for academic wiggling, something which I enjoy immensely. I find equations and formulas restrictive, like an uncomfortable hug that you have no way of escaping. You just have to sit there and take it. And cry.
In the past, my immense dislike of hard sciences has resulted in me simply ignoring them. Scientists can have their fma and dirt and exhaustive lists of data, and I'll keep my freedom to wildly speculate about what occurred in 7th century England. I've recently been convicted that simply ignoring that which we don't want to learn isn't good enough, however.
It was a blessing that this conviction came from someone who I love very much, that being Jesus (He tends to show up a lot in my thinking). Jesus has a lot to say about all that the Jewish religious elite of His time were doing wrong. He describes the religious authority of the day as pitiless brutes, harassing God's children. And yet, despite this immense dissatisfaction with the way in which they lived their lives, Jesus knew, to a letter, the law which was so very important to this religious elite. Jesus learned the very thing which was being used to oppress the people which He spent the majority of His adult life ministering to. Why did He do this? Because, quite frankly, if He had not, Jesus would have been completely irrelevant to a significant portion of the population to which He was ministering.
Much of the time in today's culture, we like to tell people that "we understand," that "we know where they're coming from." I feel like I lie to people the vast majority of the time that I say that. Until I take the time to examine how a person thinks, what forces structure their world view, I have no place saying that I understand what someone is saying or feeling. I need to engage with what they think before I can claim to be able to engage with how they feel.
This is easy to do with the things that we love learning about. I don't have any trouble taking the time to learn how to best engage with a historian or a theologian. But what about a radical feminist marxist who just got her masters in evolutionary biology? Am I willing to do whatever I can to be able to effectively relate to that individual? Do I care about that person enough to do that?
That is how I think we need to look at the process of intellectually engaging with things we don't like, as an act of caring. I'm not saying we need to go and learn everything. I am saying, however, that it is an incredibly loving act to sacrifice our own comfort to go and introduce ourselves to some new ideas. As we do this, we gain the amazing gift of being able to do more than appease our cultural norms by half-heartedly saying "I understand." We get to mean it.
With His love and hopefully His grace,
Taylor
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