In Jr. High school, my dad asked me a question, "Laura, if you had the choice of getting a thousand dollars a year for the rest of your life, or starting with a penny the first year but doubling it every year for the rest of your life, which would you choose?"

I immediately chose the thousand dollars option. A thousand dollars could buy a lot of cassette tapes in the '80s, and Quiet Riot's "Metal Health" was newly released.

He then patiently explained to me how the second option, starting with only a penny the first year, would surpass the annual income of the other at year 18, and in 30 years, I could either have $30,000 or $10, 737,544 from the exercise.

Being all of 14, and clearly more intelligent than my parents, I immediately went away and forgot his story. Or so I thought.

While my net worth is nowhere near ten million dollars, one part of my life that has grown exponentially is what I don't know. Or, more specifically, what I am aware I don't know. And with that, what I want to learn. For example, Mr. Sherrow's government and history classes in high school gave me a taste for all things history - how fascinating to study the rhythms and riddles of civilizations and people who have come before.

And so my curiosity and desire to learn everything about everything has grown through sheer interest (World War II, Russian political models, penal system reform, political strategy, first ladies, migration patterns for various birds, the life of the green heron, textile production, glass blowing...the list goes on forever) as well as through need (biochemical functioning of the human brain, effects of aluminum, mercury and other vaccine ingredients on the human nervous system, autism and related conditions, gluten free and dairy free diets, African culture, and a thousand others that line up as things that must be understood.

But there is a third area of interest as well, things that I should try to understand, even though they might seem less urgent. Things like how do I practice my belief that all people should be treated with dignity when I am employing someone at less than a living wage? How do I balance paying that person more than the local going rate with the ire of other expats for my raising the going rate? What does it mean in my life to integrate God's Word into every aspect of life? Who is my neighbor? How do I handle a person who repeatedly says one thing to my face, and then others filter back to me that the person has said something contradictory? Am I obligated to do anything other than forgive and move on? Or am I required to continue to lovingly give the person chances to tell the truth and release their anger? What of my Christian beliefs are seeded in sinful humanity and what in God's will? Why can't you give my friend's dying baby kidneys, God? Hem of your garmet, God. It's nothing to you.... And these...these maybe go on even longer than the other two groups.

My understanding, however, plods on about the same each year. I will set aside books to read, I will pray for supernatural understanding and God's wisdom, I will ask and be given occasionally extra time in the day beyond what it should give. But even at my lowly maximum production, what I am capable of learning shrinks annually in the shadow of those things I have realized I wish to know.

Don't get me wrong; I am quite content with all of this. I am thankful that God is big and I am little. Someday the questions will be answered, and I will understand the unknown and misunderstood. It is humbling to realize my smallness in the world, my finite speck amidst infinity. Comforting, even. But this mind cannot stop scratching forward in tiny outward movements nontheless.