deadly unserious

I feel like maybe I'll be in school for so long that I'll miss out on life. But the thirties are good, right? If I don't do normal people things until I'm over thirty, have I wasted my life? I just want to be involved in something beyond myself. I'm pretty sure that I don't want to do the law thing though. Let's face it: I HATE paperwork. I also really don't feel motivated by the intricacies of the justice system. But then, am I interested enough in justice to put up with it? I don't have the math/science background for medicine, but I have a persistent interest in healing. For the most part, I get the science that I have done. The problem is, I'm interested in alternative medicine, but what women in Somalia need is not an herb but surgery after violent rape.

I'm interested in justice, healing, and alleviating suffering, but to get involved in something like the UN or one of its subsidiaries seems to me to be pouring out my life into a fruitless, temporal hole. I'm convinced that societies are only changed when the people are changed, i.e. they accept some new set of assumptions/standards. This only seems to happen through conversion. When people have a hope and a rational God and standards of behavior, everything from their basic hygiene to their business practices change. Justice can only be established in a culture that has some concept of external principles, and people are only respected and not exploited (i.e. not sold into sexual slavery, etc.) in a culture where each person has value.

I just don't know where I fit into that. Also, it's wrong to look at the problem of the world and use the Christian message as merely a means to the end of fixing temporal evils. It is more than that. But I am frustrated equally by the evangelist who pays no attention to the body of the convert and the justice advocate who places more emphasis on missional living than on the Gospel. Can there be any consistent fusion of the principles?

I should be studying for Totalitarianism. And my World History paper. And a dozen other things. I finished the book Dr. Mitchell lent me: On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs, by James V. Schall. It was excellent. But then maybe I just like it because it lent justification to my pursuit of a "useless" education, that is one that is focused on pondering the things that are good to ponder in and of themselves. They serve no immediately useful purpose and yet are good for that very reason because they reflect our own creaturehood as people created as "playthings of the gods"- that is, unnecessary yet delighted in by a supremely self-satisfied God. I need to ponder the "useless" things, the bigger questions, before any of the rest of it (disparate classes filled with rootless information) makes any sense, before a vocation makes any sense, before I can find any satisfaction in what I choose to do with the few years that I have in the world.