College academia is hard, but having faith is harder. Quite possibly the combination of the two is the hardest thing I have ever dealt with.

In a perfect world, I imagine any professing Christian would be 100 percent devoted to academics, or the attainment of knowledge, and 100 percent devoted to their faith as well. How do we balance academics, which can feel so self-serving, and at the same time balance our faith, which would have us be servants of others?

How can anybody justify spending thousands of dollars for the attaining of knowledge or sitting in a classroom day after day jotting down notes and shading in answers to multiple choice quizzes, when in the end it will not matter if you failed or aced every assignment you have ever gotten?

Knowledge is very important, but in any given moment someone is suffering. As you memorize bullet points on your laptop computer, there are starving children, there are families being torn apart, suicides, people overdosing on drugs and every other conceivable suffering and false endeavor known to mankind occurring every minute of every day.

It is strange to think most of the world is searching for what many of us here at Cornerstone have already found. They are searching for the hope and love we receive through faith in Jesus Christ.

I am not an expert in anything, but I think we should consider the issue and discuss it with one another. Some things should not be left unsaid. The least we can do is listen to what others have to say.

“You get it. You’ve grasped what it’s all about,” Dan Ehnis, professor of psychology, said in reference to the issue. “There’s a bigger picture out there. The people that see the big picture get it.”

His advice is that we should piece everything together throughout our lifetime and not expect to piece everything together all at once.

Now is our time for academics. This is not to say we cannot volunteer here or there in our free time or aid people when help is required. It is to say that there is a time for molding ourselves into what we want to be and into what someone somewhere needs us to be. That time is now.

Matt Bonzo, associate professor of philosophy, in regards to humanity said, “The world is the way it is because of ideas. Part of our Christian obligation is to confront and challenge bad ideas.”

He also added that people have lost their faith or had it weakened on account of ideas.

“It’s not simply about tests and quizzes, but if your faith can’t make sense of the world around you, it’s not going to be very strong,” Bonzo said.

He went on to say that a part of any good education is practicing what you learn, but helping in an unthoughtful way can produce more suffering than relief.

My inexpert advice is this: Always be willing to help and look to where it is needed, but most importantly, pray. Our faith is shaped by our knowledge of the world, so let our future justify what we gain in college.