What the Lord's Supper means in a college student's day-to-day life.

As a chemistry graduate student, I often spend my coffee breaks with fellow students discussing the news of the day or issues surrounding our research. It is one of my favorite things about hanging out in academia; it's a fun and invigorating time to volley ideas and debate ideology.

However, my dearest friends are those with whom I can leave the intellectual competition behind and openly admit how little I know. I confess my frustrations and fears about the stacks of papers and countless experiments looming in the future, almost always when we sit down face-to-face for lunch, sharing an order of fries and a straw for a milkshake.

I often struggle with feeling alone in my convictions in a science field that hinges on tests of logic to discover the true nature of the world. The facts detailed in Scripture about the Last Supper can be infuriating when I try to reconcile them on my own. Both bread and body? Both wine and blood? This is no satisfying explanation! Luther's famous "Is means is!" becomes a knife twisted in my heart, caught up in the pride of human reason. Satan knew from the beginning that we will always crave the fruit to "be like God, knowing good and evil" (Genesis 3:5).

However, the more classes I take and the more I read, the clearer it becomes that I have no chance to truly understand this world while I am here. The truth about mysteries such as the Lord's Supper is much like the paradoxical "wave-particle duality." Twentieth-century quantum mechanics revealed that describing a ray of light as an energetic wave with a characteristic frequency is a useful description, but it doesn't tell the whole story. Light also behaves like a particle called a photon, whose impact can be measured. Is it a nebulus wave, or is it a concrete particle? We are fundamentally limited by our lack of omnipresence and must concede that the dual nature of light is observable but inexplicable.

I enjoy my days searching for patterns and order in my laboratory samples, but I am always painfully aware that I can't control the chaos, either inside my mind or in the world around me. The realization is daunting.

Even Jesus, with full knowledge of the terror that awaited him that evening in the Garden of Gethsemane, confided to his disciples in the upper room, "I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer" (Luke 22:15). He wanted to share a loaf of bread and a cup of wine at a holiday meal with his friends before he faced a painful but necessary separation from them. Though he knew the people to whom he was closest would betray, deny, and doubt him in the face of monumental hardship, Jesus gathered them one last time to make it clear that the table set that night would be a familiar place to which believers can always return.