A Challenge

It’s Feb­ru­ary. Which means that we are or soon may be fight­ing off the win­ter dol­drums. Part of the strug­gle with the dol­drums is a sense of pur­pose­less­ness. The temp­ta­tion is to ask ques­tions like: Why are we study­ing these poly­no­mi­als any­way? Who needs to learn about matri­ces? When even am I going to use this information? 

Before you start adding your own ques­tions to this list, I’d like to ask a ques­tion of my own. Why are you asking? 

Do you ask these ques­tions because you real­ly want to know the mean­ing of life and every­thing ( my son tells me it’s 42), or are you ask­ing because you’re strug­gling emo­tion­al­ly and need some­one to blame? While most mid­dle school stu­dents may claim that it’s the for­mer, it’s usu­al­ly the lat­ter that fuels these types of ques­tions. Yet, I’ll bite…

Why are we study­ing ______ anyway? 

I hon­est­ly don’t care what you put in the blank. Poly­no­mi­als, rates, math, geom­e­try, gram­mar, chem­istry… The truth is that you can put any­thing into the blank of this ques­tion and the answer will remain the same. We study hard sub­jects to dis­cov­er the unchang­ing truths of God and reveal His beau­ty and good­ness to us through the cre­ation of the top­ic. That’s it. Is it hard. Yes. If it was easy to study the things of the eter­nal God, I’d be dis­ap­point­ed, and so would­n’t you. A God that is easy to under­stand is no god at all. In the words of the Hulk: puny god. 

When am I even going to use this information? 

Here is the short answer: I don’t know, and I don’t care. I don’t wres­tle with the beau­ty of math­e­mat­ics in order to use it in some servile job any more than a per­son strives to play the piano in order to per­form for mon­ey. Doing a task for mon­ey, while essen­tial for our indus­tri­al­ized exis­tence, is not the first and more impor­tant rea­son to do anything. 

Here is the long answer: I think that what you mean by this is what prac­ti­cal rea­son does learn­ing this very dif­fi­cult sub­ject have? The prac­ti­cal­i­ty of doing hard men­tal things is revealed when you find your­self observ­ing pat­terns and pre­dict­ing the future. When we first glimpse that our brains have learned to think about prob­lems in a way that equips us to lead oth­ers in busi­ness, engi­neer­ing, build­ing, med­i­cine, art, or any oth­er voca­tion with which we engage, we quick­ly real­ize that the seem­ing­ly unre­lat­ed sub­jects we strug­gled with in school were the most important.

If the win­ter dol­drums are threat­en­ing to take your peace and tempt­ing you to protest in despair. Remem­ber, you serve a mighty God who can’t be mas­tered yet calls us to learn about Him as the Lord of cre­ation through cre­ation. It is hard, but it’s worth it.