Lifelong Learning
This is the second installment of my short series on my current life lessons.
Lesson #2: Being a life-long learner is harder than it sounds.
I had a realtor once. Nice lady with short, pouffy black hair and snappy clothing. Couldn’t tell you what her pitch was, or even her name. But she made a comment to me that stuck. “I am committed to being a life-long learner,” she told me with a confident smile.
Her comment intrigued me. Here was this sharp, put-together middle-aged woman telling me she was committed to growth. I don’t know at the tender young age of 30 that I necessarily understood the implications of that statement, but I liked the sentiment and have said the same ever since.
Fast forward to ME becoming the middle-aged woman. Dang, this life-long learner stuff isn’t for the faint of heart! It’s not just continuing to learn about things that interest me. That stuff is easy. It’s about embracing the wide-sweeping changes of technology and society, of making space to formulate informed and educated decisions and not just going with the status quo of what I’m used to. It’s about not letting the changes to my body stop me, or to allow the challenges I’ve endured to make me bitter.
Sometimes I want easy, you know?
I want everything to lay out in a rosy pathway before me, to have doors magically open. But God doesn’t work that way. Never has. He is constantly working throughout time and space to mold and shape me into something more, and that requires work on my end.
It’s a never-ending process, one that keeps drilling down deeper and deeper into the lies I have knowingly and unknowingly embraced about who I am and how I’m meant to function, and replacing them with what is beautiful and true. Including the lie that you can’t teach old dogs’ new tricks.
But here’s the thing: I believe God is bigger than my challenges. Why? Because I have seen his faithful blessing again and again in my life when I choose trust. I remember the painful bruises from running hard in the wrong direction.
