Christian Author: Writing to Raise the Gaze

SUMMER -- such as it has been in Southwestern Ontario -- is pretty much over, and students from JK kids to Post-Graduate adults are now finding their way back to the classrooms of the nation...

It's not uncommon nowadays to find mature adults -- and even senior citizens -- as students in a college or university setting, sitting alongside those decades younger than themselves.

    This reminds me of the fact that life itself is an arena of education, an institution of learning. 

Many years ago I read somewhere to the effect that "God's preparations are a long school."  And even if I only dreamed it up, I believe it to be true.

     Moses had possibly the finest education that ancient Egypt could offer (perhaps the best in the world at that time) since he was raised as the Pharaoh's son. Yet at the age of forty, following his taking matters into his own hands and killing the Egyptian who'd been beating a Hebrew slave, Moses began to learn that you cannot run ahead of God's program and do His work by human effort, alone. It would be another forty years before Moses was ready to lead the Children of Israel out of slavery in Egypt and through the wilderness to the Promised Land of Canaan; and even then, it was a further forty years before they were ready to actually cross over into it.

    There is much truth in the statement, "the day you stop learning is the day you begin to die."

Personally, I know I'm a slow learner. However, I do thank my Father in Heaven that He has been patient with me, and has allowed me to continue as a student in His "long school" -- the school of life; sometimes the school of hard knocks.

Several questions, all present tense, that came to me as I thought on these matters:

• Am I learning?  That is, learning in the sense of increasing in knowledge of the Lord Jesus and my experience of His grace, and also learning about life and how to live it.
• Am I growing?  That is, am I aware that my heart -- my spiritual, inner being -- is enlarging, growing in gratitude, and appreciation of the Lord and of people? Are my intellect and my spiritual intuition growing or shrinking? (Oh, I know my memory seems short-lived, and frayed at the edges, but do I have that vital sense of progress within?)  Jesus taught of our need to abide or remain as fruit-bearing branches in vital connection and relation to Him, the True Vine (John 15).
• Am I serving?  Education has an end in view -- that the student be equipped for life, equipped to act, apply knowledge, and contribute to the good of society as a whole. God's long school, under the counsel of the Holy Spirit equips and enables us through our surrender to the Lordship of Jesus to apply what we learn for the good of the whole, and especially for the advancement of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth.  

I'm registered and am in class already. You too?