Lifelong Learning

 

“Show me your ways, O Lord, teach me your paths; guide me in your truth and teach me, for you are my God my Savior, and my hope is in you all day long.”*

Early this spring our youngest grandson, Elliot, was selected to be on a tennis team comprised of 6^th-8^th grade boys from two middle schools. Practices were held every day of the week, when the weather cooperated, and in mid-April, competitions began with eight other middle schools.

Al and I attended many of the matches, rooting for Elliot and his team. From the beginning of the season to the end, the young athletes showed a great deal of improvement.  Not only did they gain a better understanding of the sport, they were able to apply the information their coach gave them when playing.

Learning is more than acquiring information. In the broader sense of the term, learning means having a change of behavior based on that information. The coach encouraged the team to think of each loss as a “learning” opportunity, listing the results of the players’ matches as who “won” and who “learned!”

Once when Al and I were walking along a country road in Springville, California, we spotted a ground squirrel caught in a precarious position. The fur on its back had gotten tangled in a piece of barbed wire as it tried to jump through two strands of a barbed wire fence, leaving the poor animal hanging about a foot off the ground!

When the squirrel spotted us, it became even more frantic, twisting and turning in mid-air. Painful!  I searched for a long stick to try to help it get freed from the barbed wire, while Al held on to our two dogs. By the time I returned with the stick, the squirrel had managed to free itself and scampered away, leaving behind a tuft of hair hanging from the fence!

The ground squirrel had to learn the hard way! I can relate to learning the hard way too, after climbing over a few barbed wire fences in the past! Ouch!

 Our friend, Jim Verhage, an expert bridge player, once told me that there are two pieces of advice he always tries to follow whenever he plays bridge: 1) Go slow and 2)Think before you make a move! Following that advice would alleviate a lot of pain, wouldn’t it?

Last fall, Al and I decided that the canopy on our lawn swing was too deteriorated to use again. Being in a hurry, I removed the canopy from the swing and threw it into the trash. When I tried to reassemble it recently, the hems on the ends of the new canopy kept slipping out of the grooves in the frames. There didn’t seem to be anything to hold the fabric onto the two frames.

It looked like a wire or something needed to be threaded through the hems. But what? I didn’t remember seeing anything like that when I took the fabric off the frames months ago, and there weren’t any directions in the box with the new canopy.

My quick, easy project became more complicated as I began to search for an explanatory video or directions for installing a canopy on that particular lawn swing. Finally, I found a video that explained how to sew a canopy from start to finish.

 Now that was much more detail than what I needed. However, one of the final steps in the video showed how to insert a nylon cord through the hem on each end of the canopy. This answered my question: there was a stiff cord that held the fabric taut in the grooved brace. 

 The video, an advertisement for a company that manufactured nautical and other outdoors equipment, also told what kind of cord to buy and how to order it. So now we have a new canopy for the lawn swing and about 15 feet of cord left over! Lesson learned? I hope so!

As we walk with the Lord day by day, may we have the same desire, the same yearning for Him to teach us as expressed by David in the above Psalm. And may we be avid learners of His ways!

“Blessed is the man who finds wisdom, the man who gains understanding, for she is more profitable than silver and yields better returns than gold.” (Proverbs 3:13-14 NIV)

*Psalm 25:4-5 NIV

 

                                 

 

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