Archive for October 2015
Life Is Not a Lesson Plan
Posted on: October 11, 2015
Going for a walk in the woods with my dad was always a learning experience. He had a nearly encyclopedic knowledge of wildlife, and possessed an amazing ability to spot animals and birds, and to identify sounds or signs of them. He was trail-wise, with much knowledge to pass on. We didn’t think about it that way when we were kids, of course; we didn’t spend every minute focusing on “What lesson is Daddy teaching me?” The purpose of the outings was to be together while we made our way from wherever we started to wherever we were going; learning was incidental and happened naturally as we observed, listened to, and copied our dad.
For some reason, we don’t think of our journey with God that way. For example, I have a friend whose life for many years has been just one hard situation after another, most arising from completely external sources. As she puts it, “Every time I think my platter’s full, God gives me a bigger platter – and piles more on!” Most of us can relate to the feeling. This friend is convinced that the reason she keeps facing the same kind of situation again and again is that God must be trying to teach her a Lesson, and if she can just somehow get The Lesson “right”, God will stop putting her in that situation. She’s not the only Christian who thinks that way.
Life reduced to a lesson plan.
It’s a seductive trap to fall into, assuming that everything that happens to us has as its prime purpose teaching us some particular lesson, but there are two serious problems. One, it gives us the illusion of control; we “earn” our results. We didn’t learn our Lesson? We force God to keep repeating it. We learned our Lesson? Hurray, we passed, and God is obligated to stop putting us through that kind of situation. It’s all up to us, if we can just be smart enough. The second problem is that when we approach every situation in life as being a Lesson for us to learn, we have reduced all of God’s ways and all of God’s thoughts to our own level, simplifying the “why” of His actions to a single purpose so that we can “justify” those actions. We find it easier to accept His putting us through this or that situation on the grounds that He is trying to teach us some Lesson than it is to simply trust that the situation is necessary for His purposes.
If we are convinced that every event in our life is to teach us some Lesson, but we have to stress and cogitate and tease out of Him what that Lesson is, I believe we also misjudge God’s character. Scripture does not paint a portrait of a God Who plays guessing games and Twenty Questions with His children, “That’s for ME to know, and YOU to find out.” The Biblical witness is that God delights in revealing Himself. It’s not that there aren’t important things for us to learn in life; there are. It’s not that God doesn’t bring some things into our life in order to teach us some lessons; He does. But when He does, He will make clear what He is doing, what His children need to know. Equally clear is that there is far more to His purposes than we can possibly understand and that He desires that we trust Him for that.
Life is not a lesson plan. We are not students completing a syllabus so we can graduate to Heaven. Romans 8:28 doesn’t say that God causes all things to work together for good for those who have learned their lessons. A branch doesn’t bear fruit because it has passed “Fruit-bearing 101”, but because it is organically rooted in the vine.
If Daddy led us hiking up a forested mountainside, we generally found ourselves climbing over log after log after log. It had nothing to do with him trying to teach us a lesson about how to climb over a log, and everything to do with fact that fallen logs are an unavoidable part of the landscape on such a mountainside. If you want to get to the top, climbing over logs is what you have to do. No matter how perfectly we might climb over one of those logs, it wouldn’t make the rest of the logs disappear.
If we find ourselves facing the same kind of life situation again and again and again, we shouldn’t assume it must be our fault for not learning our Lesson. If the road God has chosen for us to reach our destination is littered with a lot of “fallen logs”, we may get better at climbing over them, but our performance won’t reduce how many we have to climb over. Instead of focusing on the logs and our log-climbing-over technique, attempting to figure out what the hidden Lesson is, we will do better to keep our attention on the trail and the One leading us, trusting that what we need to learn, He’ll make sure we know.
After all, if God DOES give a test, it’s always open Book!
I Should’ve Known
Posted on: October 4, 2015
- In: Christianity | fai | forgiveness | freedom | intentional living | self-image
- 1 Comment
Anyone who knows the family in which I grew up knows that we place a high value on learning. We each may have our varying areas of stronger interest, but all of us are always on the prowl to increase the depth and breadth of our knowledge. That’s probably part of why three of us chose to homeschool our kids – it meant WE got to learn so much! (And here you thought homeschooling was about the children…)
In my junior high and high school years, I was terrifically lonely because of the cultural situation in which we were living, but although I wasn’t pretty and I couldn’t be popular, I found my place in being a useful resource. I didn’t “belong” to any group at high school, but I was accepted in any circle. I was always ready to help with homework or explain things the teacher left unclear (in anything but math, at least!) I read the newspapers and watched TV news, so was well up on what was going on in the world. I was also likely to know the real story about all kinds of things that were going on at school – such as when a “fire drill” was actually a locker search – because when you’re a “good student”, trustworthiness is assumed as a given. At the itty-bitty church we attended, I wasn’t afraid of debating with adults; because of my family background, it wasn’t uncommon that I knew as much or more than those adults did of the Bible or doctrine. I learned that knowledge can make you feel important, and that it makes a great defense against feeling vulnerable and worthless, and when necessary, it serves as a powerful offensive weapon as well.
Not that I thought of it in those terms, of course. That understanding came only after years of analyzing the experience of those painful years. Hurray for me, right? I figured my long-ago self out. Yeah, well …. In these last months, pondering the questions I mentioned previously (“Am I making myself the hero of my own story?” and “Who have I thrown under the bus?”), God has been forcing me to look under some rocks in my soul, and I’ve found some rather unpleasant bugs hiding out that try to scurry away from the light.
Proverbs 27:9 says, “Oil and perfume make the heart glad, and the sweetness of a friend comes from his earnest counsel.”
I got to have lunch with my bestie the other day. Lynda and I met in college in … 1980 (yikes!) … and for all but the five years she spent in China we have lived within a couple of hours of each other ever since. We dined on the wooden deck of a restaurant over the waters of Puget Sound in Tacoma – beautiful, hot, sunny day – light, fresh breeze – oh, yeah, bring it, baby! (A mojito would have been perfect, but, alas, I had to drive home, so I had to stick to an unleaded version.)
Lynda is a “safe” person for me – that is, I know she will listen with respect, answer honestly (if an answer is needed), and will never look down on me for or be shocked by anything I tell her. As we talked, I shared how God has been using the conference and some books I’ve been reading to bring me to face up to some very unpleasant facts about myself. Lynda settled in to her usual “I’m here for you. Tell me.” posture, and I proceeded. “I have realized that most of the time, I really hate to admit when I don’t know something. If I’m talking about a subject that I only know a little about, I may talk as if I know more than I do. Or if the other person assumes I DO know, I let them go on assuming. I always want people to think I DO know.”
Her response was not the gentle, sympathetic one I expected. No “Wow, that must be hard for you to admit.” Or even better, “I’ve never thought of you that way.” Nope. She leaned back in her chair and let loose a whoop of laughter! “Oh, Susie, honey, all your friends already know that about you – but we love you anyway!”
It was disconcerting, to say the least. Deflating. Embarrassing! Here I thought I was unveiling a dark facet of myself, only to find that I was the last to see it. I told a joke, but the audience already knew the punchline. Talk about feeling painfully, pitifully, pathetically comical.
Yet, ruminating on it more, I think that Lynda’s response to my “revelation” was a picture of God’s response to us. We dither and dodge and delay until at last we come to Him and do the Big Reveal, confessing the sins and shortcomings we have recognized in ourselves – only to find that He knew what was behind the curtain all along and had just been waiting for us to get our blinders off and recognize it, too. I daresay He sometimes gets a chuckle out it just as my friend did. He – our Friend – already knows about us, but He loves us anyway. He is not reluctant to associate with us because of our imperfections. He never says, “WELL, if I’d known THAT about you, I certainly wouldn’t have been willing to die for you!!” Seriously, what kind of God do we take Him for?
God keeps turning up the magnification and showing me just how many ways I still use knowledge as a barrier and a defense. I admit I’m still twisting uncomfortably in my seat at my confession about it, bad enough to Lynda, downright terrifying in this public format, but the point isn’t about me and my frailties. It’s about God and His generous grace.
“Dear silly child, I’m your Friend, and I’ve always known that about you – but I love you anyway!”
the susie solution 