A Word About Learning

 

I’ve been married to a teacher for a long time. My wife doesn’t spend her days in a classroom now, like she did when we were first married. But she started out teaching kindergarten and in our early years of marriage, I used to love to hear her stories of the interactions she had with her students; the things they noticed, the new awareness and learning that seemed to come along almost every day that made teaching five and six year-olds a wonderful endeavor.

 

There are two aspects to learning in the bible that I think represent anchors for life, if we come to a place of appreciating them. The first aspect of learning is a kind of ‘factual’ knowing. When my wife taught those kindergarten children math, they learned that if two birds were sitting on a fence, and two more birds came along and landed next to them, there were now four birds sitting on that fence. 2+2=4, and that’s a fact. Factual learning is an incredibly important part of life. I need to remember that water and H2O are the same thing. I need to remember important facts when I take my driver’s license test; stuff like, pass on the left, and not on the right. So many facts in factual learning. Once we’ve learned them, we can use them. 2+2 will always be 4. I don’t have to re-learn that fact.

 

But there’s another side to learning in the bible. The Bible presents learning as an ongoing process of growth and transformation. The Hebrew and Greek words for learning convey a sense of gaining knowledge through experience, practice, discipline. The Apostle Paul, for example, said that he had ‘learned to be content’ in whatever situation he found himself.’ He wasn’t saying he had mastered ‘contentment’ like he had mastered 2+2=4, and now he could move on to some other fact. His contentment was a state of being that needed constant vigilance and refinement, and I guess you could say ‘updating.’ Paul says in Philippians 3:12, “Not that I have already attained, or am already perfected …”. He was honestly calling attention to both a sense of arrival and continual ‘arriving.’ 

1 Timothy 6:6 (NIV), which reads:“But godliness with contentment is great gain.”

O Lord,

Learning contentment is perhaps one of the most important educational endeavors I could ever  pursue. In a world that often tells me I need more—more possessions, more achievements, more recognition—I am continually called back to the simplicity and truth that godliness with contentment is about cultivating a heart that’s satisfied in you. Bring me to a new awareness, today. Help me continually recognize that you are my sufficiency, and Your provision is enough. Help me avoid being consumed by a need for more. 

Sometimes, I feel like I’m still in kindergarten. Lead me to your classroom of ‘Higher Education,” will you? And as you teach me, and as I learn, may the words of Psalm 16:11 (ESV), be my song as well: 

“You make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right . hand are pleasures forevermore.” O Lord, You are more than the certainty that 2+2=4. More fulfilling than any H2O equation. You are the Living Water, the fountain of learning in which I take great delight.