We've all had the experience (sometimes the daily experience) of being shocked at how much time we've just spent staring at a screen. It usually starts innocently enough: you tell yourself you'll use the gap between classes, or the ride on the metro, to catch up on Instagram or check the Champions League scores. And then… 45 minutes are gone. You're late to class, you missed your stop, and so on — you know the drill. A subtle — sometimes not-so-subtle — pang of guilt over the wasted time creeps in. Sometimes we shrug it off, telling ourselves it won't happen again, or that we'll set a screen-time limit this time for real. Or, in a move that feels downright heroic, you decide to delete the app that keeps sucking you back in.
Here's the thing: time is the only material we have to build a life out of, to fill it with meaning, grow our talents, and chase the ideals, big or small, that every person carries somewhere deep down. Time passes, and there's no getting it back. I recently watched a documentary about pornography where a 21-year-old shared his story of struggling with the addiction. What stuck with him most was that no one could give him back the years of his adolescence he'd lost to it — years that should have been full of promise, happiness, and love. Time passes, and it's in that time that we're supposed to do so many wonderful things.
God put you on this earth for a huge reason: to be happy in this life, doing real good for a lot of people, and then to enjoy him forever in eternal happiness.
That's the lens you should look through when you think about studying and the plan God has for you as a student. His plan goes way beyond a grade, a degree, or a career. It's a plan with eternity built into it.
In his book Furrow, St. Josemaría wrote: "You must study… but that is not enough. What do those who kill themselves working to feed their self-esteem achieve? Or those who have nothing else in mind but assuring peace of mind for a few years ahead? One has to study… to gain the world and conquer it for God. Then we can raise the level of our efforts: we can try to turn the work we do into an encounter with the Lord and the foundation to support those who will follow our way in the future. In this way, study will become prayer" (Furrow, no. 526).
Even when it's dressed up in responsibility, studying can become an outlet for our deepest selfishness, or our most refined vanity.
St. Josemaría's words help clear that intention out and hand you something far more ambitious instead: to "gain the world and conquer it for God." And let's be honest, the world isn't doing great right now. You've probably felt it yourself, scrolling through the news, seeing all the wars, deaths, abuse, hunger, and inequality out there, and wanting to do something about it. Thank God, plenty of young people throw themselves into great initiatives trying to push back against all that. But a lot of the time, those efforts feel small and fleeting, next to the scale of everything that needs fixing.
That line from Furrow pulls off something remarkable, setting the bar impossibly high while also handing you something completely within reach. It gives you your studies as the surprising key that can help you do the very thing you carry so deep in your heart: changing the world.
All of this is an invitation to give your studies real weight. This isn't just about grinding through years of school as some kind of formality, or a bitter pill you have to swallow before you get to the "real" goal of a job that pays the bills and lets you feel like you're becoming someone. Student life is loaded with possibility.
A few days ago I was reading a passage from Deuteronomy that says: "See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity. If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I am commanding you today, by loving the Lord your God, walking in his ways, and observing his commandments, decrees, and ordinances, then you shall live and become numerous, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land that you are entering to possess." Strong words! They're about the weight of responsibility we carry over our own lives, and they apply perfectly to your years of studying. But they're also about promise, and it's a huge promise: to "gain the world and conquer it for God." Studying, that sometimes-mundane activity, turns out to be so much bigger than anything you could have dreamed up on your own. When you sit down to study, you're not just preparing to do something great someday. You're already doing it.
On top of all that "gaining the world and conquering it for God," St. Josemaría's teaching and the spirit of Opus Dei say that you can turn every study session into an actual encounter with God, a moment of prayer. Yes, even if your lips never move and no formal words come to mind, a stretch of studying — urgency, stress, anxiety and all — can be a moment of real, deep, intimate union with him.
One more thing: St. Josemaría says that, lived this way, our studying becomes "the foundation to support those who will follow our way in the future." It's a beautiful thought. There are real people behind all those hours of study: your family, your friends, your future community, your future kids. An hour of study is like a spiritual atomic bomb. If you let it, studying can mean a whole lot more than a grade.
So next time you're taking notes, paying attention in class, opening your laptop, joining a video call, or meeting up with friends to work on a project, remember that you can feel God your Father watching you, blessing you, and receiving that effort of yours the same way he received Jesus' sacrifice on the Cross. The Holy Spirit is pushing you to turn your ordinary life into something enormous, something with an impact that's, quite literally, cosmic.
