Choose to Learn
Years ago, when I was a missionary in Ecuador, one of my colleagues returned from furlough with a lesson. He had observed that among the older people he met, there seemed to be two distinct classes. The majority had shut down to a significant extent. They didn’t want to hear anything they didn’t already know. They were critical of new approaches and ideas and the people who brought them forward. They were generally negative about pretty much everything.
A smaller number of his older friends were continuing to blossom. They loved to learn. They embraced new approaches and ideas and appreciate the people who shared them. They were generally positive about almost everything. Dave concluded by committing to being part of the second group as the years went by. I haven’t seen him for a long time and I wonder how he’s doing with that choice made so long ago.
Like many things, learning has aspects of inevitability and choice. A new situation will present us with an opportunity to learn. The question is “what will we learn.” Some, facing something new, instantly react against it “learning” nothing more than that they don’t like it. Others, give it a chance, trying to understand it, its use, its benefits, its value.
One of my children is facing her first confrontation with Chemistry in high school. Some of the students react negatively, thinking only “This is hard. I’ll never need this in my life. Why should I learn it. I’d rather fail than put out the effort.” Others, though skeptical at first, give it a chance. They think “This is challenging. I might be able to apply this later. I should try to get a grasp of this. If nothing else it is a great brain exercise.”
Whether it’s a child staring down the garden peas on her plate, or a senior with a cell-phone in hand, they will learn something from the experience. What that something is depends on a choice they will make.
The Bible challenges people about learning. Some of the specifics are:
I don’t want to fall into the trap of just making a list of things. My giving you these examples is only to show that the idea of choosing to learn is biblically rooted. We have much to learn about truth and its application in our lives.
Now we are faced with the challenge of choosing. We might feel anxious because God is calling us to move beyond the familiar, the comfortable. But that is no reason to refuse to learn. We might feel negative because what we’re facing conflicts with things we’ve been told in the past. We’ll have to learn about this new thing and evaluate it against what we had accepted as true earlier. We might even feel repulsed because this new thing that God has allowed into our life is downright distasteful, maybe even disgusting to us.
In all of these cases, and many like them, we must choose to learn what God is giving us the opportunity to learn, not merely to confirm our negative feelings toward them. We enrich our own lives and the lives of those whom we serve when we choose to learn.
Ron Hughes
© March 2009
