Learning in War-Time

I have a very dear friend who recently told me “I don’t think I can be a history major anymore. It’s interesting enough, but it just doesn’t seem all that relevant.” She is quite involved in social justice, and continued, “I feel like the names of kings don’t matter at all. What good will they do?” My friend is now switching her history major to a minor, and taking up international relations.

This is why I am a most reluctant history major. I bashfully reveal my major to others with an air of uncertainty. It is difficult to acknowledge you are majoring in something most people see as a pleasant past time.

And really, what is the use of study old things? Why should I be pining over the housing structures of the Vikings when I could be pursuing just relations in Sudan through diplomacy? Sure I understand, as C.S.Lewis points out, that:

We need intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present, to remind us that...much which seems certain to the uneducated is merely temporary fashion.

But still, am I needed to have an intimate knowledge of the past? Does not Jesus call his disciples to drop everything and follow him? Should I not drop my own rather selfish interest in history as something pleasurable in favour of helping the world, through diplomacy, or even something like living simply, perhaps as a carpenter, helping those around me.

I have difficulty with Lewis’s “spring where you are planted” approach because that is not what God calls his people to do very often. He tears people out of their community in Ur and yanks them along the fertile crescent into Canaan. He asks a rich man to leave all behind and follow him as a disciple. I have a problem with God’s call always being where we think our passions and gifts and situation most conveiently lie.

But on the other hand, what was of some comfort to me was Lewis’s comment, “there may seem to be an almost comic discrepancy between the high issues we have been considering and the immediate task you may be set down to do.” And Lewis said that such activity just proves those who are both humble and tough.

Although I should never be quite comfortable where I am, and be ready to tear up my stakes when God leads me, I must also work diligently in the position God has set before me, remembering Milton:

God doth not need
Either man's work or his own gifts. Who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly: thousands at his bidding speed,
And post o'er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait.