Applying Again

Learning is application. Learning is not knowing or supposing or figuring out; learning is being able to apply what you know. It is integratig new and right knowledge into your habitual way of doing things. It is like a girl who gets her permit and, without ever touching the steering wheel, assumes she knows how to drive. It not only takes time, but it takes failure and practice. THAT is learning: being willing to fail and implement what I know until I do it, am it.

Sometimes, ok all the time, I have to relearn. Over and over again I have to strive to implement humility and a dependence on the Lord. Being in Ireland, away from the support system I know and the things I love to do and the person I am working to be, I am re-realizing how much I need to depend upon the Lord for encouragement and significance. I know what humility and peace and dependence look like, but I need to learn it, to try again.. even though I fail over and over.

C.S. Lewis once said that "[God] wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles." It is not the perfection of the outcome our God is looking for, it is the commitment to follow.

Rainer Marie Rilke:

I believe in all that has never yet been spoken.
I want to free what waits within me
so that what no one has dared to wish for
may for once spring clear
without my contriving.

If this is arrogant, God, forgive me,
but this is what I need to say.
May what I do flow from me like a river,
no forcing and no holding back,
the way it is with children.

Then in these swelling and ebbing currents,
these deepening tides moving out, returning,
I will sing to you as no one ever has,
streaming through widening channels
into the open sea.