Me, “The World”, and other fun stuff like that

Some tentative conclusions after a couple months (well -- probably years) of head-banging on a lot of this. And after a year of college.

Last post aside, I have suffered a bit of cultural disjunction since coming home. Blue jean skirts and courteous boys and Bible studies and fellowship and all that are cool. But I do rather disagree with what seems to be the general underlying outlook on non-Christians and interaction with them. ("They're the evil world, of course they'll hate you and disagree with you, just ignore them, you don't have to have an answer for everything, how many atheists do you run into in real life, anyway?") Substitute in "non-conservatives" and "evil liberals" for things relating politics.

Anyhow...

a) I live right smack dab in the middle of the "world."
Or, if I don't right now, that's the trajectory that my life is headed in. I'm in college, for starters...and there is a pretty good possibility that I’ll transfer at some point, and most likely not to a Christian college (not that Hillsdale is, one, technically...). I'm in "higher education," and will be for at least the next 6-8 years. I have a bad habit of intermittently lurking discussion boards right now. I run into -- or am going to run into – those EVUL liberal/atheist/progressive people all the time. They're people I am -- or am going to -- eat lunch with, study with, talk with, and be colleagues with for a good many years. They are not some insane, screwy, virtually-1% of the population that I'll never meet in real life. (goes looking for charts of statistics...)

b) Some people can be right smack dab in the middle of things, and still manage to ignore and insulate themselves from it. In all honesty and sincerity -- awesome for them. But I can't.
Stuff I run into out here gets to me. It disturbs my nice, neat, pretty view of reality. It eats at my brain until I hammer it out, understand it, and maybe add at least another layer of subtlety to my thinking. It is fascinating, depressing, and exhilarating all at the same time. I have a LOT of trouble ignoring things once I've let myself become aware of them.

c) I wouldn't have it otherwise -- either a) or b).
I'll keep living in the middle of things, and I'll keep trying to wrap my mind around the stuff I run into. I'd like to think I do so because it's the way God hardwired my personality and brain -- not everyone finds all this "fascinating, depressing, and exhilarating," but I do. There are other explanations for this, but I'm pretty much finally at peace with the "brain hardwired this way--and that's OK" way of looking at the matter.

Either way, it's still an "I will," not an "I can't help it" (I've used "can't" mostly to get across my very strong persuasions on the matter). Even hardwiring is changable. I'd be in bad faith (ooh! cool technical term I finally found!) if I said otherwise.

Point c) aside, and at the very least, all these people I run into are my neighbors, and I owe them the common decency of trying to know them and understand them. I've seen my lunchroom habits over the past year, and I do think there's something wrong with them. Since when did "be in the world, not of the world," mean "you must wall yourself off with your nice Christian friends and wait for the Kingdom to hit"?