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!