It may not have occurred to you before, but life is a learning adventure. We have this life that we may experience and grow and learn and more often than we may think, unlearn. Living life each day affords us almost endless opportunities to learn new things. Our learning is certainly not confined to childhood. And as part of our experiences and situations and circumstances, we are presented with an opportunity to learn life lessons that will lead us to greater realities and understanding. When we find ourselves in negative situations that appear eerily similar, we can be sure there is a life lesson that we would benefit from learning. When we discover ourselves confronted with the same challenges year after year, those challenges provide us with an opportunity to learn something new; to pay attention; to investigate further. To say that’s just how life is, is to be unwilling to learn further. Many, many people have resigned themselves to some fate that isn’t really their fate at all, but rather a life lesson that needs to be considered further. Finally learning the lesson, escaping from some life sucker, choosing a different path leads to a victory not soon forgotten. God desires for you and me to continue learning, leading to a life that gets better and better every day. He wants us to enjoy wholeness in every category of life and He is more than willing to help us learn. He lets us, because free will is sovereign, falter and fail and fall at times, not because He wants us to, but because though He desires the best for us, He never will overstep our freedom of will. It’s like when people foolishly ask, “Why does God allow all of the suffering in the world?” Suffering happens because of a failure to learn the lessons. If every time we touched a prickly bush we injured our fingers, it’s not God’s fault, but rather our fault for insisting on continuing to touch the bush! The life lessons are literally all around you. The question is will you learn the lesson?
Learning life lessons consists of the things that are happening or not happening in your own life. Positively learning a life lesson leads to good fruit which encourages you to continue. Bad fruit or no fruit points to an area of your life needing further inspection. There is a reason for everything that happens in your life, as the saying goes, but that reason is not always a good reason. Evil exists, though very carefully hidden, and it works to take away life, diminish life, and reduce life down to the lowest possible level, mere survival. It is the reason for every negative thing that ever happened to you. It enslaves people, tortures people and afflicts people. It is the polar opposite of life, real life. Evil takes advantage of what people don’t know. It gets you to accept mediocrity and habituates you towards settling for less. It’s chock full of media slurs and Facebook slogans that sound pious but have nothing to do with the truth. “Sometimes God makes you suffer because…” Because of what? It’s not that God produces or wants suffering, but rather suffering comes as a result of being out of harmony with Him, by believing things that are not true, by not learning the lesson contained in the circumstances. Asking why is God doing this to me is not the lesson you need to learn. Rather why does this keep happening to me is closer to the truth. God doesn’t perform evil (ever) and He certainly doesn’t need evil to help you learn. The life lesson can be found right in the situation. But, you have to be willing to learn or to unlearn something. You have to willing to humble yourself to a greater reality than what you may think inside your own brain. You have to be willing to admit you don’t know at times and to quit pretending that you do. Life is so much bigger than our human intelligence. God is so much bigger. Learn the lesson.
In order to start learning the life lessons you have been presented with, you must get back to having the heart of a child. Children just assume they don’t know and thus are ripe for learning. Oh how much life would change if we were willing to just be honest with ourselves. The areas of our lives where we fail and we falter happen because there is something more we need to learn. Often we are unknowing victims of very crafty deceptions. Even more often we simply have been taught things that are not true and in that error we always fall. Once we finally get honest with ourselves (and that seems to take some time) the next step is to get honest with God. Not honest in the painful, negative idea of confessing all of our sins and failures to Him, but honest in admitting that we do not know what to do. Honest as in talking to your Father, not the judge, about what has been bothering you or what parts of your life you keep getting tripped up. Honest in the sense of seeking help, not in imagined punishment for your missteps or weaknesses. The reason people don’t go to their Creator for the help they need is because they have been fed all these lies about who He is. And just guess whose behind all those lies. The same one that seeks to keep you defeated and bound. God is never behind the painful lessons of life, but He is far ahead in providing us with the solutions. All He asks is that we ask Him, not the so-called experts, the philosophers, the internet sages, the scientists, the politicians, the religion experts, but Him the author of all things pertaining to life. He loves us far more than we can comprehend and in that love He still cares for us even when we are at our very worst. How absurd to think we can not go to Him or to seek His help because of how good or bad we are. He is so much bigger than stuff that people do. He’s so much more dependable than that! Learn the life lessons with God’s help.
Life lessons exist for all of us. Every single day and the moments in the day offer us an opportunity to learn something, to keep learning. It does not matter how old you are or how young you are. Life lessons aren’t the new experiences we may have or new hobbies or new information. Life lessons are things we need to learn to live our best life, to overcome challenging situations, to live in the God-given freedom that God had already given us. Life lessons become God’s desire to alleviate the suffering, to heal the wounds, to repair our damaged hearts and to return us to the life He desires for us to live. What has been bothering you lately? What has been holding you back in life? What challenge do you have that you cannot seem to overcome? Contained in those questions are life lessons that are there for you to learn if you really want to. Learn the lessons and prevail!
Just some good thoughts…