Teachability

Well, starting these blogs are always the absolute worst part for me. Is anyone else like that? Like, I’m getting flashbacks to trying to write a seemingly endless amount of papers while in college, and I almost ALWAYS wrote the introduction last. I think I put too much pressure on myself. The first sentence is like a first impression, and those can be intimidating. And sometimes the fix to that pressure is just to dive off the deep end and see what happens. So here’s my deep end introduction 🙂 It’s good to be writing again after several months of activity, rest, and then more activity. Also, a fun thing to acknowledge, I have officially been living in Romania for over two years! I don’t really have a whole lot to say about that, other than it feels like a milestone and I’m excited about the years to come!

Anyway, I’ll stop rambling now and get on with it. Something that has been on my mind this week has been the idea of lifelong learning. As kids, we hate the idea of school going on forever, and I mean, it doesn’t. But as an adult, the longer I live the more I realize how much I don’t know. And there are different ways that people cope with the realization that there’s so much we will never know. Some people close off their world, shrink it to a size they can understand, and then never leave that world they’ve created. Others become obsessed with understanding, seeking to become the most wise or knowledgable about a variety of subjects. Both of those options sound pretty exhausting and isolating to me. So then I have to ask the question, what’s the best response? And honestly, it could be different for different people, but here’s what I’m learning about me. Teachability is important. Like, not the ability to teach others, but the ability to be taught. Which is different than the ability to learn. Maybe I’m being too nuanced about this, but hear me out. Learning is something we can do “on our own.” Teachability requires a teacher, it requires a relationship. One thing that those two responses have in common that I just listed is that they both seek to reach a place of not needing to be taught. Either by blocking out new things, or by tirelessly trying to keep up with all of the new things, so as not to be outdone or found lacking.

And then I’m reminded of Jesus. He was a teacher. Not like a formally trained teacher, but people referred to him all the time as teacher. And that got me thinking. Who hung out with Jesus? Who actually learned from him? Cause it wasn’t the Pharisees who “knew everything” and tried to catch him up in a lie or an error. That’s not being teachable when you’re just trying to be right. Because being taught means you don’t know something, or even that you could be wrong about something. It also wasn’t the people who kept trying to hold on to their own view of their world. Like the young man who asked Jesus what he needed to do to be saved. Jesus gave him an answer outside of his understanding, and he left. Not because he was teachable, but because he wanted validation for the world he had created in his mind.

That leaves us with the people who WERE teachable. And they were an interesting group. Fishermen, lepers, foreigners, tax collectors, women, kids, and lots of other people demonstrated a willingness to learn from Jesus. People from different ethnicities, religions, social statuses, ages, genders, just about every identifier that comes up on a college or job application, there were people who listened to and were taught and transformed by Jesus. It wasn’t just the people who were good at school, it wasn’t just the people who were disciplined and did their homework every day, it was the people who were willing to suspend what they thought they knew, and believe him when he did what he said he would.

So where does that leave you and me? Well, for me, I like being right. I mean, who doesn’t? But I’m learning that there are things that are more important than being right. That doesn’t mean truth isn’t real or important, it just means that sometimes we have to be brave enough to think outside of our own worldview, and humble enough to admit that we could be wrong. And all of that can be done within the framework of understanding that Jesus is the only one who spoke only the truth all the time. So learning from people who are different from me is good, but it’s not gospel. Only Jesus can be trusted 100% like that. It also means that learning can be something that is relational, something that breaks down barriers instead of creating them. Because when I’m teachable, I’m learning from people who are in some way different from me, and that not only builds community, it also builds trust. So my challenge for you this time is to think through areas in your life where you are teachable, and areas where you are not. And then to ask yourself, what is it going to take for me to get to a place where I am brave enough to step outside of the comfort of my own world, and humble enough to let someone else teach me? I think we might find that doing that makes the world a little less scary, and a little less lonely.