I am a learner. Not just because I’m in school. It’s the way I am. I love learning. I love the process of learning. I love new ideas and letting them dance around my head with old ideas. Sometimes I have to give old ideas eviction notices to make room for some better renters.
I can’t help it. If I’m frustrated, antsy, angry, annoyed, it’s probably because I have stopped learning. I don’t need to be an expert at any one thing, I like to learn about all kinds of things.
After I complete the MATC at Northwest University. I have a plan to teach myself German and French. Why? Because I don’t know them, and I need to. There is so much information out there that I want to meet.
The thing that I have to constantly be aware of is that I need to not just acquire the information. I have to be very diligent to apply the information. I can learn from anything, but I have to know going in to the project how am I going to apply what I’m learning.
In college I took anatomy, I got a B, I did fine. But I had no desire to apply what I learned so retention and comprehension were not as important as simply passing to fulfill my science requirement.
Right now there are few things that I am loving learning about. First, the theology of Church. My classes, conversations with other pastors, talking to people in church I love to get all kinds of information, and I can apply it immediately. It’s the best. It fuels me, challenges me, and encourages me.
My second favorite topic right now is Comedy. I listen to all kinds of comedy podcasts, I watch comedy documentaries, because I want to apply this stuff to actually doing comedy. I will probably never be an expert at comedy, but I love learning about. I have listened to the Jim Gaffigan podcast of Nerdist 8 times (if you go search it out there are swears so be warned if that offends you). Gaffigan is a comedy nerd and he’s got so much great stuff to say about comedy.
If I wasn’t as interested in applying the information, I wouldn’t really care about taking the time to really learn. I think our education system tries to make everyone a cookie cutter student and we want well rounded students, that’s a good thing. But the better thing is to find what the student wants to learn and pour as much gasoline as possible on that fire.
In the church I think we have these things that we think people need to learn, but we either don’t have a clear application so we strike out, or we are not taking the time to figure out what our congregations want to learn, or what they need to learn (as opposed to what we want to teach). So people die on the vine because we are not speaking to them.
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