Finals week (or WEEKS) has a way of placing you in a nice and cozy existential crisis. Whether you’re cranking out insurmountable papers, studying an obscene amount of biomolecular structures, or trying to memorize over three hundred Chinese characters, there comes a point when you wonder whether you’re doing the right thing in terms of career and vocation.

I have been reliving metabolic pathways in my dreams and nightmares for weeks, staring at the pot I put on the stove and forgetting what I was going to do next, when I would rather be brainstorming for literary papers (YES I am that person). So many times I’ve stared off into the swirling snow outside while panic built up inside of me, and I asked God if I had just wasted my whole four years of college on something I’m not good at, no matter how hard I try. Because even though I love science, and I study hard, it doesn’t come to me easily. It’s not a natural talent, and I often worry that if I had chosen writing I would’ve been really good and useful in my field—whereas right now I feel mediocre at best in both writing and science.

Maybe that’s true, and maybe it isn’t and this is just the finals blues talking.

I’m sure I would’ve continued the downward spiral of finals week if I hadn’t been stopped by something I came across earlier in the week. I was trying to distract myself from despair by scrolling through Instagram, when I came across a video in Bob Goff’s account. For anyone who doesn’t know, Bob Goff is the author of the New York Times Bestseller Love Does. He used to have a law firm that he eventually left, and is the Honorary Consul to Uganda (no big deal, right?). He also founded Love Does, a humanitarian organization that provides safe houses and education to many children and women in Iraq, Somalia, India, Uganda and Nepal.

Something in my heart burned when I looked through the work of Love Does, but when I got to the safe houses and education provided for women and girls in Somalia, my heart stopped beating, as though saying, "Stay here. Look, pay attention, and learn."

So I clicked on this video below to learn more about what the safe houses from Love Does accomplish in Somalia.

My heart still hurts at the reality of girls being raped at four years of age, of daughters given away by their families to men old enough to be their grandfathers who abuse them into submission.

But still my heart doesn’t hurt enough.

Because it is easy—it is so easy to shut out that reality and lock myself back into my little microcosm of petty anxieties that is truly a luxury when compared to the hell people live through every single day. Sometimes I really wish I could step out of my body just so I could turn around and shake myself by the shoulders. Because I am in a stupor that doesn't let me see the significance of how what I learn can help someone else have a better life.

In my classes, am learning about metabolism and how food affects the growing of our cells.

I am learning about endocrine pathologies and DNA mutations.

I am learning about reproductive health and environmental health that means life and death for the coming generations.

My heart has learned, when I hold a baby while we examine her blood tests at the clinic for lead and I get to look into her dark, staring eyes, to shout inside my layers of flesh and bone—to shout to God begging to give this baby a bright and loving future.

I am learning that the reason I learn is not so I can boost up my ego, write a book someday, earn a high-paying position somewhere, or have an impressive resume like the award-winning snowflakes society would demand we become. I am learning all of these skills because God loves the women in Somalia, the women in those safe houses. God loves the girls fighting to become educated and break the cycle of oppression. His heart is completely theirs. I am fullyconvinced of it. And the only reason I get to learn these things is to serve these girls and women and do the work of God, which is, and has ALWAYS been, despite the imposition of our evangelical traditions that have more in common with the Pharisees than with Christ, to break the yoke of oppression that binds the hurting. To turn those heavy chains into healing bandages of balm and comfort.

This is such a big dream, and sometimes I can’t believe I get to be a part of it. I can’t believe my academic experience at this time of my life is actually training me with skills to better love my sisters and brothers near and far. This is God’s dream and it gets to be mine too.

And I know that it’s so easy for us to lose sight of this dream. God never meant for us to work non-stop without fuel like automatons. He never meant for us to give love without being filled with it first.

In one of his letters to Jesus followers, the apostle John wrote:

God is love. When we take up permanent residence in a life of love, we live in God and God lives in us. This way, love has the run of the house, becomes at home and mature in us, so that we’re free of worry on Judgment Day—our standing in the world is identical with Christ’s. There is no room in love for fear. Well-formed love banishes fear. Since fear is crippling, a fearful life—fear of death, fear of judgment—is one not yet fully formed in love.
We, though, are going to love—love and be loved. First we were loved, now we love. He loved us first.

This finals season, I get to study a scary amount of material for my tests.

But I also get to practice the discipline of building new dreams. My new dream is to become perfected by his love. It’s a daunting task because my chances of failure are huge. I’ve been trying to follow Jesus since 2009 and I still suck at loving people. I often get caught in a vicious in-between state where I’m torn between wanting to be alone and feeling so lonely. I know there are mental health components that factor into this, as well as the busyness of life and the stress of school and the difficulty of doing relationships well.

But, as Jon Foreman sings, “Love alone is worth the fight.” If there’s anything we were made for, it’s love. If there’s anything worth fighting for, it’s love. The kind of love that drove God to do the most he could do to save the creation he mourned and loved.

I don’t know about you, but living a life of merely existing has been exhausting, isolating, and crippling. We have to trust that the power of Christ to make me a person who loves well is bigger than the odds against us. We have to trust that God will not give up on his mission to set the captives free, despite history's setbacks and disappointments, and often through them.

So let us build new dreams that encompass more than the rat race, the corporate ladder and the myth of the American dream--or, if you're a college kid like me, dreams bigger than GPAs, resumes, honorary mentions, and diplomas. The harvest is plenty and the laborers few. I'm preaching to the choir here. I need to hear these words more than anything else.

I have found the paradox,
that if you love until it hurts,
there can be no more hurt, only more love.
-Mother Theresa