Warning: This is a longer post. I apologize, but I would like to say that I really do think it is worthwhile. I wouldn’t waste your time with a longer post if I didn’t.
Over the course of the last five years I have experienced a resurgence of love for reading. I always loved it as a child & into the late elementary grades. For some reason though, I wavered when I hit Jr. High. I guess it wasn’t cool anymore, or, probably more likely, I hit puberty & suddenly books were overtaken by girls. It is insanely hard for any normal teenage boy to think about girls for less than 23 & 1/2 hours per day. (The other 1/2 hour is of course spent thinking about what he might be able to do in order to attract said girls.) Anyway, my love for books was overshadowed & forgotten during this hormonal surge of my life that lasted until my twentieth birthday.
Now, I had obviously continued reading to some degree over that time period, but it was always a chore. I took as many short cuts as possible using Cliff’s Notes & nerdy peers. However, I really began rediscovering the joys of reading about 5 years ago. It was really odd now that I think about it because it pretty much happened over the course of a single day. I was reading a required text for class & I happened to take a second & realize that I was actually enjoying what I was reading. “Holy crap, Sam!” I said to myself, “You’re really enjoying this aren’t you?! Ha,ha, ha! You’re such a loser!” (I can be rather harsh with myself at times.) Long story short, I have absolutely loved reading again ever since that day. I can’t get enough! I’ve got a list a mile long of books backed up just waiting for their opportunity to be read, & the more I read, the longer it seems to get.
I was just thinking about this today because I have been especially enjoying the book I’m currently reading. Its an old book by a guy named M. Scott Peck, PhD called “The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth.” One of the things that he says is that in order for any kind of spiritual growth to occur there must be learning. There is a direct correlation between one’s growth spiritually & one’s quest for knowledge. This is because, in his assessment, a cornerstone of spiritual growth is a dedication to the truth & all true learning is an investigation & discovery of truth. Normally, I would have just read something to this effect & nodded my head in agreement because it seems so self-evident. Obviously, we need to be continually learning about & growing closer to God & his people in order to grow spiritually, but that isn’t necessarily what Dr. Peck is talking about. He is talking about feeding your mind with knowledge & wisdom. Learning more, not just about God & Christianity specifically. Learning more about science, literature, language, politics, technology, medicine, psychology, architecture, web design, sports, music, creativity, logic, history, & the list goes on & on forever.
As CS Lewis says, “One of the things that distinguishes man from the other animals is that he wants to know things, wants to find out what reality is like, simply for the sake of knowing. When that desire is completely quenched in anyone, I think he has become something less than human.”
I look back & I realize that my rekindled love for reading over the past few years has coincided with unprecedented spiritual growth in my life. Obviously, it isn’t the sole reason for that growth. Numerous other factors have played into that, but I have been convicted today that the driving force behind my growing faith has been a ravenous hunger for knowledge.
Just like my list of books gets longer with every book I read, I find that the more I learn, the more I realize the staggering depth of what I do not yet know, & the stronger my faith becomes, the more I realize how very far I’ve yet to go. So, I want to encourage you today to be learners. Not just “spiritual” learners either, but complete learners.
(Insert cheesy piano music & shooting star graphic here)
The more you know…
