Never Stop Learning

I hope to never stop learning, and it will be a sad day if I do.

Learning is a wonderful thing, but it's not always easy. When I speak of learning, I mean everything everything from learning facts, methods, ways of thinking, or even growing in character, in faith, etc. With things like facts, it's pretty quick and painless. With things like faith, it often takes time, effort, intentionality, and can even be painful. Painful because to grow, it requires failure. It requires us to realize that left to our natural desires and instincts, we will fail. We will fall short of the standard set before us by Jesus, without whom we would have no means of this growth. And that's the point of the gospel, without Jesus, we aren't good enough! The point I'm trying to make is that learning takes many forms.

The past three weeks here in MN have been training weeks for myself and the other CTI fulltime members. I certainly knew that there would be a lot to learn: music, a team role, probably a drama. I did not realize how intense it would be! Sure, I've been learning a lot of music, but plenty more as well. I have two team jobs, am playing a role in two dramas, and for the past week I've been staying late with the other sound tech for more training. Those extra training sessions were definitely an eye opener. I had no idea how little I knew about sound things! I consider myself a curious guy, and I thought I'd collected a fair bit of sound knowledge over time, but I've certainly been learning how much I have left to learn!

With all of these things I've been learning, I've been getting a little stressed. Thinking things like, "Didn't I just graduate? And now I'm spending up to 13 hrs a day learning more things?" or more seriously, "I'm not sure if I can handle this". There's so much I have been learning and still have to learn, and I feel I have a lot of responsibility on my team. And if I'm going to be honest, I've been a little scared lately.

I had been telling myself that it will all be alright once our team finishes learning. But we won't ever stop learning! Sure we'll know the music and dramas, but we will continue learning about God and His character. We will continue to learn about each other and how to communicate with, respect, and love each other. We will keep learning so many of these things. But bigger than all of that, I hope that we will all learn to not attempt all of this on our own.

This year will be quite challenging as I've been learning (even during training), and I don't think we'll be able to do it on our own. My prayer is that we would not attempt to. That we would stop striving to be better, to meet the impossible standard set by God. That we would not try to become intrinsically righteous, but surrender ourselves to instead be clothed in the righteousness offered by our God. I hope you will join me in this prayer - for the CTI teams, and for you as well.

Like I was saying before, learning can be difficult, but I hope to never stop learning.