Learning in War-Time

In this sermon, Lewis talked about one of weaknesses of human beings.
During war time, people usually forgot God. All they thought about was to protect themselves. Our faiths were “interrupted by death or military service”. People thought that God would forgive them since they had a good reason to ignore God. But should we have excuses to avoid the existence of God?
Lewis thought that we should always be aware of God and serve him at anytime, any situation. If people were not at war, they might not be able to notice their indifference toward God. Actually, human beings were always ignoring God, they didn’t like to confess that until they had to face the fact at a certain period of time such as war time. Our levels of devotion toward God don’t change; it is only time and situation changed. As Lewis mentioned in the essay, “The war creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it.”
Then Lewis directed us to the weakness of human beings. As he wrote, “Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure the search would never have begun.” After reading this article, I just realized that I am actually ignoring God involuntarily. I am always thinking to start my daily devotion sometimes. But everyday, I felt like that I had so many things to do. I had to go to class in the morning; I had to do my homework in the afternoon and at night; I had to work and so on. Each day, I told myself, after finishing these things, I would sit down and read my Bible. In that case, I would have the entire left-over time to devote myself to God. But that never happened: I always had something to do. It seemed like that your “something” can never be finished. The ideal condition when I would have free time to serve God becomes some empty promises.
If we think that we should search something only after we secured everything else around us, we will never begin to search. We are always distracted when we are searching things. We think that we should focus on doing one particular thing, but it can only end up missing something else. If we want to serve God, it is better to start right away instead of doing it later.
As students, we should not take study as an excuse to ignore God. Especially in a Christian college, what we can do is to study but at the same time, to honor God through our work.