Learn your alphabet

I talked last time about living to the best of your ability, but I’ve been reflecting about life and where I’m being lead and I’ve come to a conclusion. We should Live and then learn.

Have you ever watched a kid try something new? Or maybe you can remember when you first learned to write?

Someone showed you what to do, you may not of completely understood what you were doing, you just followed the example. You practiced the shapes and sizes of letters and spacing, until you felt comfortable with it and could write any time. Then you learned to fine-tune your writing. Maybe you learned new fonts of more about how to write, and how to use words. You learned in school how to “Properly” express yourself.

But here’s the problem, we’ve grown up in a society that incorporates this mind–set, but teaches more so the characteristics of knowledge over doing. In history or writing class you research and learn before you write. In school we study and study before we do anything with what we want to be.

Our society focuses on knowledge and not living.

Look at a major candidate in money given to students in college. It’s not based on how outstanding you live your day, or treat others; it’s based on your act score, or how much you “Know”.

We as humans learn more not from sitting and listening or taking it in, but from hands on. Being an art major I learn more about painting from painting, than from reading about it. I would rather someone show me how to do something, than open a book and read about how to.

But that’s what Jesus did for us. He gave us this book, a guideline for our life, but he also sent us examples. I think we need to focus less on doctrinal discrepancies, little details, and facts. We need to turn our focus to living and showing, and not just telling, the world (our community, even our friends and family) Jesus.

We are to be Christ and he will be in us, we are not called to know everything in this book, in fact for centuries many Christians didn’t even own their own copy.

In fact not even until hundreds of years after that were verse and chapters put into the text to better reference our resources. These have advantages, but I think only once we have learned to live. For new Christians it breaks up the story making it easier to pull things out and dwell on them rather than the whole picture.

We need to learn to live and then learn to better understand who we are called to be.

Calling ourselves Christians doesn’t make us followers of Christ, and in fact calling ourselves Christians, but living a way that is contradicting to his word can give bad name and have the opposite affect on the world than were are called to.

Our actions are what the world sees!

so let's start back at the basics. Learn the basic outline, practice the shapes, fine-tune our living and then learn to express ourselves through Christ, just like we learn to write.