Learning

Learning is the same as changing.  We change when we learn (knowledge, beliefs, values, actions)

• All change brings loss.  Some times it is painful or humiliating, other times not so much.
• All loss brings some sort of grief.  Especially when a change affects the framework of all that we hold true.
• We mostly seek to avoid loss for mental, emotional, social, and spiritual reasons.  We want to have certainty; it brings security and confidence.
• It is hard to learn something new because it causes us to walk in uncharted territories that often times don’t feel safe and that may cause us to give up on what we have always held so dearly in the past.  Some enjoy this sense of mental adventure; most seek to avoid it in extremes.
• Do you know everything that you will ever know? Of course not. We have been and always will be learning and thus changing; it would be arrogant to insist otherwise.
• What will you learn in the future? Tell me what you do not know or understand? We can’t. We don’t know what we don’t know.
• What of what you will learn in the future will replace (change and loss) what you know now and hold to be completely right?
• Everything you now know must always be held with open minds and palms, in humility, if you would ever be able to learn something new that would change what you know now.
• What is the difference in feeling between: Being Right and Being Wrong?  Nothing.  It is only a change in feeling when we REALIZE that we were wrong.  Both perceptions bring about the exact same feeling, confidence, and unwillingness to change.
• What are you feeling now about all that you know and hold to be true?  Right or Wrong?  How would you really know the difference? When would you ever be able to know the difference?
• (Not promoting Dualism) The real us resides inside our brains.

o   “I HEART you” is, in all actuality, scientifically inaccurate. It really should read, “I BRAIN you!” It doesn’t look as cute on a Hallmark card.

o   How does the inner reality that we experience inside our brains/self correspond to the outer realities beyond and outside ourselves?  How do we access that outer reality to help us to make sense of our inner reality (of what we know to be true)?

o   Our inner reality corresponds with the outer realities through our 5 senses (some may say 6 senses… a Spirit directed leading).

o   We therefore must trust and have complete faith that what our 5 senses are communicating to us is accurate and true.

§  However, have you ever misread a conversation and responded wrongly?

§  Have you ever brushed something off your arm when nothing was there?

§  What about amputees and the brain getting signals from their missing foot that it needs scratching?

§  Have you ever thought you saw something that you didn’t see?  Think witness at a crime scene.  People will swear up and down what they saw to be true when in fact they miss it completely.

§  We get it wrong all the time.

o   Helen Keller had 2 of her 5 senses that didn’t function which gave her a warped perception of reality in her early years.  She would have remained in her delusional inner world if it were not for Annie Sullivan who helped her connect her safe inner reality to the outer reality.  She then began to interpret the differences of her inner and outer realities in other ways.

o   An Alzheimer patient’s brain is not functioning correctly.  The inner reality is not corresponding with the outer reality.  The person suffering from this reality altering disease may be 80 yrs old and think they are in 6^th grade or reading this paper on how we learn!!! So how do you know that you aren’t suffering from Alzheimer’s right now? You trust that you are not.

• How do you know something is right or wrong before you ever read it completely or hear the thought out. If you did know it was right or wrong before you read or heard it, you would be prejudging (deciding) before the evidence was ever completely presented. This would be based on previously known beliefs or truths which may be the very paradigmic barriers that would keep you from learning something new and right, and which may ultimately replace what had previously been held, comfortably and securely, as true and right.
• Some examples of how this resistance to learning something new because we assume that everything we currently know is completely accurate are in order:

o   The Pharisees were keepers of the Torah of YHWH.  They were so concerned to follow and obey God the right ways.  They even put up a hedge of rules around the commandments that would keep them from breaking the very commandments (think of contemporary injunctions of it being a sin to drink alcohol as being a hedge of becoming drunk and breaking the actual commandment of God).  They were so focused on what they knew to be right that they could never see that they were wrong and missing the incarnation of the very one they were seeking to obey.  Even Saul, later Paul, was so focused on what he knew to be right that he oversaw the killing of Stephen and wreaking havoc on the young Church of Jesus.

o   The disciples were so focused on what they knew to be right and accurate concerning the kingdom that they acted like the Three Stooges stumbling over what to do and what not to do as it related to Jesus’ Kingdom is now available to all message.  “Let’s set up houses” for Moses and Elijah at the Transfiguration; “Can we be the first and second in your command when you come into your kingdom, Jesus?” “Get that little kid away from Jesus. He is too busy for children!” And after the resurrection of Jesus and his teaching about the kingdom for 40 days, the disciples actually asked, “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?” They could only see what they saw and could not see what they couldn’t see.  Or to put it another way, they didn’t know what they didn’t know, and it wasn’t obvious until they learned that they were wrong, which took a miracle!

o   Years later after a completely Jewish focused ministry, Peter had a vision of a sheet filled with all kinds of animals (clean and unclean) being let down and heard a voice that said for him to kill and eat.  After boldly and righteously refusing this voice three times, did he finally realize that what he had held to be completely true was changing and that he was about to learn something new… that he would help the Gentiles to be part of this decade old new covenant.

o   For centuries, the Jews and the Christians viewed the world as a flat, square object and that it was the center of the universe. It wasn’t until the 14^th and 15^th centuries when Copernicus and Galileo’s scientific research forced the Church and well-meaning Christians to change their minds.

o   In the long seminal history of our country, well-meaning and theologically trained Christians did not view slavery as the atrocious act that it was and is. Contemporary Christians look retrospectively in disbelief at our forefathers who owned slaves and supported that social structure through the lens of Scripture at times.  Paul’s own interaction with Philemon, over Onesimus, does not promote an abolitionist perspective even though encouraging Philemon to release the new believing slave at the expense of Paul’s own relationship and/or payment.  We still have some Christians who cannot fully let go of that slave mentality and view others in a demeaning way.

How arrogantly are you holding on to what you know to be the full, complete, and accurate reality? How does one live in a world where you feel that everything you know may not be the end result or completely accurate, corresponding fully with how things really are?  We do so humbly confident.

As a child we learned new information as best we could grasp it. However, what we learned, because of our own developing cognitive capabilities, was not completely right and did not fully correspond with an outer reality.  Take where babies come from.  A two-year old’s understanding of where babies come from does not represent reality.  But that toddler walks around confident that the answer given or discerned is exactly right.  As the child grows, he may learn incrementally more of that reality.  However, even after he fully understands that it is a mommy and daddy who love each other and can fully grasp the physical explanation, he still is at a loss because he has not experienced the act that makes it possible for sperm and egg to join their respective 23 chromosomes thus forming a baby.  And even after experiencing the sexual union and thereby conceiving and holding a baby, the result of that encounter, the now mature man still is at a loss to where babies come from.

Traditional religious explanations say that God put that baby together giving her the exact characteristics, gifts, and idiosyncrasies that He, from the beginning of time, planned.  Whereas a naturalistic scientist would offer another explanation of complex DNA realities existing in those 23 chromosomes that match up and thus arbitrarily produce the fully unique offspring, he, nor the 100% theologically focused man,  cannot fully comprehend how the soul or spark or the aliveness of the human being comes about or from where it comes.  The best we come up with sounds something like a toddler’s explanation (in comparison to reality) at a more advanced stage of the process.

So we operate within what we know, all the while realizing that we do not fully understand everything.  However, we remain curious.  As Christians, we must remain humbly curious to know and discover what God has created and how he has created it.  For just because we are not infinite and omniscient in our understanding, does not mean that we do not stop learning and discovering and growing.  For learning and using our imagination to discover is part of what it means to be created in the image of God.  For when God created Adam and Eve, we don’t have any indication that God told this young naked couple what to do to have children.  He in essence said, “Figure it out.”  And that is what learning is all about with discernment. Figuring out what we don’t know to be true, through understanding or experience, and growing as a human created in the image of God with a mind that is continually curious, is what it means to be alive.

Therefore, as humbly confident disciples of Jesus, we take every thought captive making it obedient to Christ and give glory to God every time we turn over a new rock and with that feeling of finally understanding a riddle, we say, “Oh, I get it! God, you are infinitely and omnisciently awesome! Thanks for allowing me to grow closer to your truth and reality!”