Lead, Kindly Light

Today, L and B joined us for church again, which was really awesome. It was a great encouragement to me, to see that now — even eight days before the bar exam — these two guys (who probably didn’t go to church through all of law school) took several precious hours out of their study time to attend a worship service. Both seemed to appreciate the sermon as well, and B even mentioned that he would probably continue to attend church even when we all move to the City to start work in the fall. This is exciting news, and I hope that L will also join us as we hunt for a solid church. I wait and pray with great anticipation as we see where this all leads in the end.

Of course, it may lead nowhere — as I was bluntly reminded yesterday by a friend… I must try to believe he was speaking out of kindness and gentle warning, rather than pessimism about the fruits of evangelical pursuits. But as followers of Christ, I believe that the Gospel must be shared with everyone, even if it seems impossible (to us) that they might actually be saved in the end. The whether and when of people’s coming to know Jesus as their personal Savior is all our Boss’s business, the whole of which we cannot even begin to comprehend or grasp. So the only part we as followers are responsible for is obeying Him in His call for us to act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God — and part of walking with Him involves sharing His truth and love with the people around us.

I think it’s also important that we expand our view of who constitutes “the people around us.” This was a hot topic of discussion in my Bible study on social justice this past year… I’ve heard a lot of Christians justify their corporate jobs by saying that God needs people ministering to the law firm partners, the Congressmen, the Supreme Court clerks, and other high-profile folks in the legal world. I entirely agree with them — but at the same time, if those are the only people we think of when we think of “people around us,” we are grossly mistaken. There are pages, paralegals, personal assistants, janitorial service people, cab drivers, bailiffs, and all sorts of other people “around us.” And for people going into the criminal law field like me, prisoners and their families, and victims and their families, as well as cops, are most often at the forefront of my mind. I think that they constitute my greatest mission field.

When I look into the future and I imagine what my career will end up looking like forty years from now, I often wonder how it will turn out. I find that when I write emails to update former college professors, high school teachers (yes, I still keep in touch with a few of them!), or old friends about what I’m up to now and where I’m going, I tend to talk about how I want to transition out of corporate work to do federal prosecution for a while, then teach criminal justice at a college, and become a juvenile court judge — because the juvenile justice system, in my opinion, is the single most important point of intervention in the criminal justice system. This is natural, of course, because it’s a fair prediction of the trajectory I’m on, and … well, that’s the sort of thing people are wanting to hear about.

But… once I finish rattling off the spiel, I still feel a sort of emptiness and anxiety inside. An inexplicable weight of dissatisfaction pervades, and internally I sink into a private bubble filled with heavy sighs and uneasy murmurs. This is because I know that a legal career can have the appearance of worldly success without having a single ounce of value for the Kingdom of God, which is what really matters, from now until in the end. I’m just now reminded of I Corinthians 13, in which Paul instructs that if we do all manners of great things — but do them without love — then whatever we do is as empty as a clanging cymbal. It just makes lots of noise and causes a ruckus, but has no real value. So it is with my legal career.

I desperately want my life to matter. More than anything else that I worry about (the big ones currently being: passing the bar exam, staying safe and healthy in China for 30 days, and making all my loan payments on time), I am anxious about whether — at my death, if at 30 or at 80 — I will have genuinely impacted lives around me in furtherance of the Kingdom of God.

Will it have made any difference at all, from an eternal perspective, whether or not I was in someone’s life? That’s the question that burns in my soul as I look to the future. This calls for prayer, for wisdom, humility, grace, and power from the Holy Spirit. I don’t know how many years I have on this Earth, and when I go to heaven, I want God to say that I did a good job with whatever He gave me in the way of talents, time, and opportunities.

Dreaming about providence
And whether mice or men have second tries
Maybe we’ve been livin’ with our eyes half open
Maybe we’re bent and broken, broken

We want more than this world’s got to offer
We want more than this world’s got to offer
We want more than the wars of our fathers
And everything inside screams for second life
-Switchfoot