The Game of Life: Night School
The Game of Life
06.23.05
Night School: Keep Asking Questions
This evotional continues The Game of Life series. Last week we talked about getting out of the boat. Next week’s evotional will focus on pursuing your passions. This week our stop is night school: keep asking questions.
Deep Thoughts
One of my favorite philosophers, Jack Handey, has written one of my favorite books, Deep Thoughts. I thought a few “deep thoughts” might help get your mind in gear.
One day one of my little nephews came up to me and asked me if the equator was a real line that went around the Earth, or just an imaginary one. I had to laugh. Laugh and laugh. Because I didn’t know, and I thought that maybe by laughing he would forget what he asked me.
Whenever someone asks me to define love, I usually think for a minute, then I spin around and pin the guy’s arm behind his back. Now who’s asking the questions?
Children need encouragement. So if a kid gets an answer right, tell him it was a lucky guess. That way, he develops a good, lucky feeling.
As the light changed from red to green to yellow and back to red again, I sat there thinking about life. Was it nothing more than a bunch of honking and yelling? Sometimes it seemed that way.
If you’re traveling in a time machine, and you’re eating corn on the cob, I don’t think it’s going to affect things one way or the other. But here’s the point I’m trying to make: Corn on the cob sure is good, isn’t it?
Maybe in order to understand mankind, we have to look at the word itself. Mankind. Basically, it is made up of two separate words—“mank” and “ind.” What do these words mean? It’s a mystery and so is mankind.
Keep Asking Questions
I read a fascinating study a few years ago. According to the research of Rolf Smith, kids ask 125 probing questions a day. As the father of three young children, I believe him. In fact, I did a little experiment myself a few years ago. When my oldest son, Parker, was five years-old, I kept track of his questions for a week. Here is a small sampling:
Where do hills live?
Why do whales live in water?
Why do planes go over cars?
Why do caterpillars turn into butterflies?
Why do stars come out at night?
Why do houses have doors?
My favorite question that Parker asked during my week-long experiment was: “Why do horses bounce?” I said, “Do you mean trot?” He said, “No, I mean bounce.”
As part of my little experiment, I wanted Parker to know that there isn’t always an easy answer to every question. So I decided to turn the tables and ask him a question. I thought long and hard to come up with a question that I thought would stump my five-year-old. The best question I could come up with was: “Parker, why does it rain?” Without a moment’s hesitation, my five year-old lowered his voice to what I’d call a “let me tell you the way the world works” tone, and replied, “Because everything is thirsty.”
I tried.
Take another look at those questions. They aren’t the “two plus two” garden variety. Those questions require tremendous knowledge of geography, oceanography, aeronautics, entomology, astronomy, and architecture. For what it’s worth, I have an educational theory. I think we send our kids to school not just because we want them to get smart. We also send them to school to keep ourselves from feeling dumb!
Here’s the bottom line: kids are interested in everything. There is an innate curiosity that is God-given. That’s why they ask 125 probing questions per day. Want to know how many probing questions adults ask each day? Six! That means that somewhere between childhood and adulthood we lose 119 questions per day!
Here’s my point: keep asking questions.
I love the way Albert Einstein said it: “The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity.” I love that last phrase: “never lost a holy curiosity.”
I think that is part of what Jesus meant when he said in Matthew 7:7: “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened.” The people who ask the most questions have the most answers. The people who seek the hardest find the most. And the people who knock on the most doors have the most doors opened for them. It’s that simple. It’s all comes back to a simple principle: you have not because you ask not.
By the way, Jesus didn’t just talk the talk. He walked the walk. We only have one glimpse into what Jesus was like as a child, but don’t underestimate the significance of what Jesus models even as a twelve year-old. Joseph and Mary took the entire family on a road trip to Jerusalem for the Festival of Passover. When the family went home, Jesus stayed in Jerusalem. He was MIA for three days. Luke 2:46 says, “After three days they found him in the temple courts, sitting among the teachers, listening and asking them questions. Everyone who heard him was amazed at his understanding and his answers.”
Jesus was prodigious, but don’t overlook the fact that the Son of God gathered information the same way we do: He asked questions. So if you want to be like Jesus, you need to keep asking questions. He modeled it and commanded it.
The Original Job Description
God gives humankind these instructions in Genesis 1:28: “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”
Genesis 1:28 is humankind’s original job description. I think some people assume that if Adam and Eve hadn’t eaten the forbidden fruit they would have never ventured outside the Garden of Eden. That is a misreading of the text. Long before Adam and Eve were banished from the garden, God told them to “fill the earth and subdue it.”
Stop and think about it. God was inviting Adam and Eve to explore. Everything outside Eden was terra incognita. They could travel 24,759 miles in any direction and never see the same river or mountain twice. There were 196,949,970 square miles of virgin territory to explore.
Not unlike Columbus who was commissioned by the King and Queen of Spain to discover a westward route to the Indies; not unlike Lewis and Clark who were commissioned by President Jefferson to explore the newly acquired Louisiana Purchase; and not unlike Sir Francis Drake who was commissioned by the Queen of England to circumnavigate the globe; Adam and Eve were commissioned by God to explore planet Earth.
One way we glorify God is by exploring what He’s made and praising Him in the process.
Hold that thought.
The word “education” means “to draw out.” Maybe we’ve got it backwards? If you observed what happens in most classrooms in most schools you’d be tempted to think that education is trying to cram as much information into the cranium as possible. I’m not suggesting that we don’t need information. But education at its best draws us into discovery. Unfortunately, that happens too infrequently in classrooms. I think Plato was right: “Do not train youths to learn by force and harshness, but direct them to it by what amuses their minds so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.”
Here’s a thought: graduating from college is like exiting the Garden of Eden. The learning process doesn’t stop. It starts. That’s why it’s called commencement. Our formal education is preparation for the informal education that begins the day we walk the line and receive our degree.
What does that have to do with Genesis 1:28? Let me connect the dots. The word “rule” in the NIV or “dominion” in the KJV literally means “to draw out.” God wanted Adam and Eve to educate themselves about everything He had made. He was drawing them out. He was inviting them to explore and discover.
Can you imagine studying about an artist like Pablo Picasso without looking at his paintings? Can you imagine studying about a composer like Ludwig Von Beethoven without listening to his music? Can you imagine studying about an author like Shakespeare without reading what he wrote?
It seems absurd doesn’t it? It’s about as absurd as studying about the Creator without studying creation. It’s about as absurd as studying theology without studying neurology or astronomy or ornithology.
Just like an artist who wants others to enjoy his art; just like a composer who wants others to enjoy his music; just like an author who wants others to enjoy his books; God wants us to enjoy His creation. He wants us to explore it and study it and name it and admire it.
What I’m trying to say is this: exploration honors God. The astronomer who charts the stars; the geneticist who maps the human genome; the researcher who seeks a cure for Parkinson’s disease; the oceanographer who explores the barrier reef; the ornithologist who studies and preserves rare bird species; the physicist who tries to catch quarks; the chemist who charts molecular structures; and the theologian who studies God have one thing in common. All of them are explorers. They are fulfilling humankind’s original job description.
Cat and Mouse
I’ve always been intrigued by something Solomon says in Proverbs 25:2: “It is the glory of God to conceal a matter; to search out the matter is the glory of kings.”
Francis Bacon had a fascinating take on that verse. He said, “Solomon, although he excelled in the glory of treasure and magnificent buildings, of shipping and navigation, of fame and renown, yet he maketh no claim to any of those glories, but only to the glory of inquisition of truth; for so he saith, ‘The glory of God is to conceal a thing, but the glory of the king is to find it out!’; as if, according to the innocent play of children, the Divine Majesty took delight to hide his works, in the end to have them found out; and as if kings could not obtain a greater honour than to be God’s play-fellows in that game.”
It is almost like this cosmic game of Cat and Mouse. And here’s the exciting thing. The game of life doesn’t end the day we die. That’s when it really begins. Life is the pre-game warm-up.
Brent Curtis says it this way in The Sacred Romance:
He who has been faithful in the small things will be given even greater adventures in heaven. We long for adventure, to be caught up in something larger than ourselves, a drama of heroic proportions. This isn’t just a need for continual excitement; it’s part of our design. Part of the adventure will be to explore the wonders of the new heaven and new earth, the most breathtaking of which will be God himself. We will have all eternity to explore the mysteries of God, and not just explore, but celebrate and share with one another.
Did you know that astronomers now estimate the existence of eighty billion galaxies? That’s more than ten galaxies per person! And it’s taken thousands of years for billions of us to explore part of one planet in one galaxy!
Capture Your Thoughts
Two verses have captivated me lately. Habakkuk 2:2 says, “Write down the revelation.” There is an old proverb: the shortest pencil is longer than the longest memory. If you don’t write down the revelation then the revelation will be lost.
The other verse is II Corinthians 10:5: “Take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.” I think that is one of the most important verses in the entire Bible because the battle is won or lost in the mind. We’ve got to control our thoughts because we become what we think about. I think that verse is multi-dimensional in meaning and application, but I think one way we “take captive every thought” is by writing down our thoughts. It’s that simple.
A few years ago, Catherine Cox did a study of three hundred of history’s greatest minds. She found one common denominator: all three hundred geniuses recorded their thoughts and feelings, their ideas, insights, and observations, their reflections and questions in a journal of one kind of the other.
I think one difference between successful and unsuccessful people is what they do with their ideas. I love the way Atari founder, Nolan Bushnell, put it: “Everyone who's ever taken a shower has had an idea. It's the person who gets out of the shower, dries off and does something about it who makes a difference.”
Successful people have a mechanism for capturing their ideas and then acting on them. Unsuccessful people forget about them. I read a fascinating interview with Jeff Taylor recently and he shared how he got the idea for Monster.com.
He woke up a 4:30 AM one morning and began writing down a flurry of graphics and text on the pad of paper next to his bed. Then he got up and went to a coffee shop and spent the next five hours jotting down his business plan for the job search engine.
He said, “It would have been pretty easy to have rolled over and gone back to sleep, and that would have been a multibillion-dollar opportunity I would have let go by.”
Here’s what I’m trying to say: write stuff down. I think it’s a spiritual discipline. That’s why I blog. That’s why I write notes in the margin of every book I read. That’s why I write stuff on napkins from restaurants and barf bags from airplanes.
For what it’s worth, Leonardo Da Vinci never went anyplace without his notebook. He was constantly recording ideas and observations. Even on his deathbed he took detailed notes about his symptoms. We still have seven thousand pages of Da Vinci’s journals. In 1994, Bill Gates purchased eighteen pages for $30.8 million!
I’m not sure our thoughts will ever be worth that amount of money, but they are worth capturing. Especially God ideas! In the words of Victor Hugo, “All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come.”
You are What You Read
II Timothy 4:13 is one of those verses that you barely notice, but there is an important principle buried in the biblical footnote. Paul says, “When you come, bring the cloak that I left with Carpus at Troas, and my scrolls, especially the parchments.”
Here’s my translation: take a book with you wherever you go.
That’s what I’ve done since I graduated from college. I never go anyplace without a book. I read on airplanes. I read on the metro. I read at restaurants while I’m waiting to be seated. If I’ve got a few minutes between meetings I’ll read a few pages.
For what it’s worth, I’ve always been inspired by Abdul Kassem Ismael, the Grand Vizier of Persia in the 10th century. He was such an avid reader that he took his 117,000 volume library with him whenever and wherever he traveled. His books were carried by a caravan of four hundred camels trained to walk in alphabetical order.
So what’s your excuse?
I know that most of us feel like we’re too busy to read, but if you simply put a book in your bathroom, there isn’t anybody who couldn’t read a book a month. Some of you have even more potential than that! It’s about redeeming the time and being wise with the spare moments in our day.
Stanford physician, Walter Bortz, coined the term disuse syndrome to describe how negligence in the area of physical activity can destroy health. It’s a basic principle of physiology: any part of the body that falls into disuse will atrophy. That certainly includes the mind.
I remember reading a sobering statistic a few years ago. A study found that the average college graduate reads two books a year. I just don’t think that’s good stewardship. I’m not saying that all of our learning ought to come from reading books. Books are just one piece of the pie. But I’m not sure that two books a year is good stewardship of your mind.
The word “disciple” comes from the Greek word mathetes which means “learner.” By definition, a disciple is someone who never stops learning. Your brain only weighs about three pounds. It’s the size of a softball. But did you know that neurologists estimate that you have the capacity to learn something new every second of every minute of every hour of every day for the next three hundred million years? God designed us with unlimited storage capacity! You were designed to never stop learning!
I read a fascinating book recently titled The Know-It-All by A.J. Jacobs. It’s subtitled: one’s man humble quest to become the smartest person in the world. To make a long story short, A.J. Jacobs read the Encyclopedia Britannica from A to Z. That’s thirty-two volumes. That’s 33,000 pages. That’s forty-four million words!
Jacobs said he did an “intellectual swan dive” after college. He said, “I crammed my cranium with pop culture jetsam.” If we aren’t careful, we can fill our minds with meaningless things. The average American is bombarded with thousands of advertisements every day. There is more information in a Sunday edition of The Washington Post than the average person living in the 18th century would digest in a lifetime. There are hundreds of magazines and thousands of books published each week. Even if you’re in great remote control condition, it’ll still take several minutes to click through the hundreds of channels available on digital cable. And you could spend the rest of your life googling the Internet. Two words: information overload.
Jacobs said he knew the names of ‘N Sync’s singers, including their choreographer. “But this meant anything profound got pushed out. I could talk confidently about the doughnut-eating Homer, but I’d forgotten all about the blind guy who wrote long poems.”
Learning is not a luxury. The most important law of ecology is this: L ≥ C. In other words, for an organism to survive, the rate of learning must be equal to or greater than the rate of change. In his book Megatrends 2000, John Naisbitt says, “Learning how to learn is what it’s all about.” Alvin Toffler adds, “The illiterate of the future are not those who cannot read or write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”
Learning is a stewardship issue! Mathematically speaking, the Great Commandment is 25% intellectual. The mind is one of four dimensions of love referenced by Jesus in Matthew 22:37. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength.”
I remember getting a cup from Amazon.com a few years ago with a quote that is one of my all-time favorites. Mahatma Gandhi said, “Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”
That’s a pretty good approach to life: keep learning!
06.23.05
Night School: Keep Asking Questions
This evotional continues The Game of Life series. Last week we talked about getting out of the boat. Next week’s evotional will focus on pursuing your passions. This week our stop is night school: keep asking questions.
Deep Thoughts
One of my favorite philosophers, Jack Handey, has written one of my favorite books, Deep Thoughts. I thought a few “deep thoughts” might help get your mind in gear.
One day one of my little nephews came up to me and asked me if the equator was a real line that went around the Earth, or just an imaginary one. I had to laugh. Laugh and laugh. Because I didn’t know, and I thought that maybe by laughing he would forget what he asked me.
Whenever someone asks me to define love, I usually think for a minute, then I spin around and pin the guy’s arm behind his back. Now who’s asking the questions?
Children need encouragement. So if a kid gets an answer right, tell him it was a lucky guess. That way, he develops a good, lucky feeling.
As the light changed from red to green to yellow and back to red again, I sat there thinking about life. Was it nothing more than a bunch of honking and yelling? Sometimes it seemed that way.
If you’re traveling in a time machine, and you’re eating corn on the cob, I don’t think it’s going to affect things one way or the other. But here’s the point I’m trying to make: Corn on the cob sure is good, isn’t it?
Maybe in order to understand mankind, we have to look at the word itself. Mankind. Basically, it is made up of two separate words—“mank” and “ind.” What do these words mean? It’s a mystery and so is mankind.
Keep Asking Questions
I read a fascinating study a few years ago. According to the research of Rolf Smith, kids ask 125 probing questions a day. As the father of three young children, I believe him. In fact, I did a little experiment myself a few years ago. When my oldest son, Parker, was five years-old, I kept track of his questions for a week. Here is a small sampling:
Where do hills live?
Why do whales live in water?
Why do planes go over cars?
Why do caterpillars turn into butterflies?
Why do stars come out at night?
Why do houses have doors?
My favorite question that Parker asked during my week-long experiment was: “Why do horses bounce?” I said, “Do you mean trot?” He said, “No, I mean bounce.”
As part of my little experiment, I wanted Parker to know that there isn’t always an easy answer to every question. So I decided to turn the tables and ask him a question. I thought long and hard to come up with a question that I thought would stump my five-year-old. The best question I could come up with was: “Parker, why does it rain?” Without a moment’s hesitation, my five year-old lowered his voice to what I’d call a “let me tell you the way the world works” tone, and replied, “Because everything is thirsty.”
I tried.
Take another look at those questions. They aren’t the “two plus two” garden variety. Those questions require tremendous knowledge of geography, oceanography, aeronautics, entomology, astronomy, and architecture. For what it’s worth, I have an educational theory. I think we send our kids to school not just because we want them to get smart. We also send them to school to keep ourselves from feeling dumb!
Here’s the bottom line: kids are interested in everything. There is an innate curiosity that is God-given. That’s why they ask 125 probing questions per day. Want to know how many probing questions adults ask each day? Six! That means that somewhere between childhood and adulthood we lose 119 questions per day!
Here’s my point: keep asking questions.
I love the way Albert Einstein said it: “The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity.” I love that last phrase: “never lost a holy curiosity.”
I think that is part of what Jesus meant when he said in Matthew 7:7: “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened.” The people who ask the most questions have the most answers. The people who seek the hardest find the most. And the people who knock on the most doors have the most doors opened for them. It’s that simple. It’s all comes back to a simple principle: you have not because you ask not.
By the way, Jesus didn’t just talk the talk. He walked the walk. We only have one glimpse into what Jesus was like as a child, but don’t underestimate the significance of what Jesus models even as a twelve year-old. Joseph and Mary took the entire family on a road trip to Jerusalem for the Festival of Passover. When the family went home, Jesus stayed in Jerusalem. He was MIA for three days. Luke 2:46 says, “After three days they found him in the temple courts, sitting among the teachers, listening and asking them questions. Everyone who heard him was amazed at his understanding and his answers.”
Jesus was prodigious, but don’t overlook the fact that the Son of God gathered information the same way we do: He asked questions. So if you want to be like Jesus, you need to keep asking questions. He modeled it and commanded it.
The Original Job Description
God gives humankind these instructions in Genesis 1:28: “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”
Genesis 1:28 is humankind’s original job description. I think some people assume that if Adam and Eve hadn’t eaten the forbidden fruit they would have never ventured outside the Garden of Eden. That is a misreading of the text. Long before Adam and Eve were banished from the garden, God told them to “fill the earth and subdue it.”
Stop and think about it. God was inviting Adam and Eve to explore. Everything outside Eden was terra incognita. They could travel 24,759 miles in any direction and never see the same river or mountain twice. There were 196,949,970 square miles of virgin territory to explore.
Not unlike Columbus who was commissioned by the King and Queen of Spain to discover a westward route to the Indies; not unlike Lewis and Clark who were commissioned by President Jefferson to explore the newly acquired Louisiana Purchase; and not unlike Sir Francis Drake who was commissioned by the Queen of England to circumnavigate the globe; Adam and Eve were commissioned by God to explore planet Earth.
One way we glorify God is by exploring what He’s made and praising Him in the process.
Hold that thought.
The word “education” means “to draw out.” Maybe we’ve got it backwards? If you observed what happens in most classrooms in most schools you’d be tempted to think that education is trying to cram as much information into the cranium as possible. I’m not suggesting that we don’t need information. But education at its best draws us into discovery. Unfortunately, that happens too infrequently in classrooms. I think Plato was right: “Do not train youths to learn by force and harshness, but direct them to it by what amuses their minds so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.”
Here’s a thought: graduating from college is like exiting the Garden of Eden. The learning process doesn’t stop. It starts. That’s why it’s called commencement. Our formal education is preparation for the informal education that begins the day we walk the line and receive our degree.
What does that have to do with Genesis 1:28? Let me connect the dots. The word “rule” in the NIV or “dominion” in the KJV literally means “to draw out.” God wanted Adam and Eve to educate themselves about everything He had made. He was drawing them out. He was inviting them to explore and discover.
Can you imagine studying about an artist like Pablo Picasso without looking at his paintings? Can you imagine studying about a composer like Ludwig Von Beethoven without listening to his music? Can you imagine studying about an author like Shakespeare without reading what he wrote?
It seems absurd doesn’t it? It’s about as absurd as studying about the Creator without studying creation. It’s about as absurd as studying theology without studying neurology or astronomy or ornithology.
Just like an artist who wants others to enjoy his art; just like a composer who wants others to enjoy his music; just like an author who wants others to enjoy his books; God wants us to enjoy His creation. He wants us to explore it and study it and name it and admire it.
What I’m trying to say is this: exploration honors God. The astronomer who charts the stars; the geneticist who maps the human genome; the researcher who seeks a cure for Parkinson’s disease; the oceanographer who explores the barrier reef; the ornithologist who studies and preserves rare bird species; the physicist who tries to catch quarks; the chemist who charts molecular structures; and the theologian who studies God have one thing in common. All of them are explorers. They are fulfilling humankind’s original job description.
Cat and Mouse
I’ve always been intrigued by something Solomon says in Proverbs 25:2: “It is the glory of God to conceal a matter; to search out the matter is the glory of kings.”
Francis Bacon had a fascinating take on that verse. He said, “Solomon, although he excelled in the glory of treasure and magnificent buildings, of shipping and navigation, of fame and renown, yet he maketh no claim to any of those glories, but only to the glory of inquisition of truth; for so he saith, ‘The glory of God is to conceal a thing, but the glory of the king is to find it out!’; as if, according to the innocent play of children, the Divine Majesty took delight to hide his works, in the end to have them found out; and as if kings could not obtain a greater honour than to be God’s play-fellows in that game.”
It is almost like this cosmic game of Cat and Mouse. And here’s the exciting thing. The game of life doesn’t end the day we die. That’s when it really begins. Life is the pre-game warm-up.
Brent Curtis says it this way in The Sacred Romance:
He who has been faithful in the small things will be given even greater adventures in heaven. We long for adventure, to be caught up in something larger than ourselves, a drama of heroic proportions. This isn’t just a need for continual excitement; it’s part of our design. Part of the adventure will be to explore the wonders of the new heaven and new earth, the most breathtaking of which will be God himself. We will have all eternity to explore the mysteries of God, and not just explore, but celebrate and share with one another.
Did you know that astronomers now estimate the existence of eighty billion galaxies? That’s more than ten galaxies per person! And it’s taken thousands of years for billions of us to explore part of one planet in one galaxy!
Capture Your Thoughts
Two verses have captivated me lately. Habakkuk 2:2 says, “Write down the revelation.” There is an old proverb: the shortest pencil is longer than the longest memory. If you don’t write down the revelation then the revelation will be lost.
The other verse is II Corinthians 10:5: “Take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.” I think that is one of the most important verses in the entire Bible because the battle is won or lost in the mind. We’ve got to control our thoughts because we become what we think about. I think that verse is multi-dimensional in meaning and application, but I think one way we “take captive every thought” is by writing down our thoughts. It’s that simple.
A few years ago, Catherine Cox did a study of three hundred of history’s greatest minds. She found one common denominator: all three hundred geniuses recorded their thoughts and feelings, their ideas, insights, and observations, their reflections and questions in a journal of one kind of the other.
I think one difference between successful and unsuccessful people is what they do with their ideas. I love the way Atari founder, Nolan Bushnell, put it: “Everyone who's ever taken a shower has had an idea. It's the person who gets out of the shower, dries off and does something about it who makes a difference.”
Successful people have a mechanism for capturing their ideas and then acting on them. Unsuccessful people forget about them. I read a fascinating interview with Jeff Taylor recently and he shared how he got the idea for Monster.com.
He woke up a 4:30 AM one morning and began writing down a flurry of graphics and text on the pad of paper next to his bed. Then he got up and went to a coffee shop and spent the next five hours jotting down his business plan for the job search engine.
He said, “It would have been pretty easy to have rolled over and gone back to sleep, and that would have been a multibillion-dollar opportunity I would have let go by.”
Here’s what I’m trying to say: write stuff down. I think it’s a spiritual discipline. That’s why I blog. That’s why I write notes in the margin of every book I read. That’s why I write stuff on napkins from restaurants and barf bags from airplanes.
For what it’s worth, Leonardo Da Vinci never went anyplace without his notebook. He was constantly recording ideas and observations. Even on his deathbed he took detailed notes about his symptoms. We still have seven thousand pages of Da Vinci’s journals. In 1994, Bill Gates purchased eighteen pages for $30.8 million!
I’m not sure our thoughts will ever be worth that amount of money, but they are worth capturing. Especially God ideas! In the words of Victor Hugo, “All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come.”
You are What You Read
II Timothy 4:13 is one of those verses that you barely notice, but there is an important principle buried in the biblical footnote. Paul says, “When you come, bring the cloak that I left with Carpus at Troas, and my scrolls, especially the parchments.”
Here’s my translation: take a book with you wherever you go.
That’s what I’ve done since I graduated from college. I never go anyplace without a book. I read on airplanes. I read on the metro. I read at restaurants while I’m waiting to be seated. If I’ve got a few minutes between meetings I’ll read a few pages.
For what it’s worth, I’ve always been inspired by Abdul Kassem Ismael, the Grand Vizier of Persia in the 10th century. He was such an avid reader that he took his 117,000 volume library with him whenever and wherever he traveled. His books were carried by a caravan of four hundred camels trained to walk in alphabetical order.
So what’s your excuse?
I know that most of us feel like we’re too busy to read, but if you simply put a book in your bathroom, there isn’t anybody who couldn’t read a book a month. Some of you have even more potential than that! It’s about redeeming the time and being wise with the spare moments in our day.
Stanford physician, Walter Bortz, coined the term disuse syndrome to describe how negligence in the area of physical activity can destroy health. It’s a basic principle of physiology: any part of the body that falls into disuse will atrophy. That certainly includes the mind.
I remember reading a sobering statistic a few years ago. A study found that the average college graduate reads two books a year. I just don’t think that’s good stewardship. I’m not saying that all of our learning ought to come from reading books. Books are just one piece of the pie. But I’m not sure that two books a year is good stewardship of your mind.
The word “disciple” comes from the Greek word mathetes which means “learner.” By definition, a disciple is someone who never stops learning. Your brain only weighs about three pounds. It’s the size of a softball. But did you know that neurologists estimate that you have the capacity to learn something new every second of every minute of every hour of every day for the next three hundred million years? God designed us with unlimited storage capacity! You were designed to never stop learning!
I read a fascinating book recently titled The Know-It-All by A.J. Jacobs. It’s subtitled: one’s man humble quest to become the smartest person in the world. To make a long story short, A.J. Jacobs read the Encyclopedia Britannica from A to Z. That’s thirty-two volumes. That’s 33,000 pages. That’s forty-four million words!
Jacobs said he did an “intellectual swan dive” after college. He said, “I crammed my cranium with pop culture jetsam.” If we aren’t careful, we can fill our minds with meaningless things. The average American is bombarded with thousands of advertisements every day. There is more information in a Sunday edition of The Washington Post than the average person living in the 18th century would digest in a lifetime. There are hundreds of magazines and thousands of books published each week. Even if you’re in great remote control condition, it’ll still take several minutes to click through the hundreds of channels available on digital cable. And you could spend the rest of your life googling the Internet. Two words: information overload.
Jacobs said he knew the names of ‘N Sync’s singers, including their choreographer. “But this meant anything profound got pushed out. I could talk confidently about the doughnut-eating Homer, but I’d forgotten all about the blind guy who wrote long poems.”
Learning is not a luxury. The most important law of ecology is this: L ≥ C. In other words, for an organism to survive, the rate of learning must be equal to or greater than the rate of change. In his book Megatrends 2000, John Naisbitt says, “Learning how to learn is what it’s all about.” Alvin Toffler adds, “The illiterate of the future are not those who cannot read or write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”
Learning is a stewardship issue! Mathematically speaking, the Great Commandment is 25% intellectual. The mind is one of four dimensions of love referenced by Jesus in Matthew 22:37. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength.”
I remember getting a cup from Amazon.com a few years ago with a quote that is one of my all-time favorites. Mahatma Gandhi said, “Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”
That’s a pretty good approach to life: keep learning!
2 Comments:
Mark- this week's evotional sparked today's entry to my own blog.
"Live as if you were to die tomorrow, learn as if you were to live forever." ~Mahatma Gandhi
I think this is a great quote because it asks people to relish a certain dynamic tension. Let me explain. I suppose that if you knew you were going to die tomorrow and you sat down and made a list of all the things that you wanted to accomplish before the imminent hour, reading and learning wouldn't be anywhere on that list. Your list would probably include bungee jumping, skydiving, a trip to the zoo, perusing old photographs and a couple dozen phone calls. But now let's examine the other half of Gandhi's quote. I suppose that if you knew for certainty that you were going to live forever one of the first things that you'd do is begin to read. You see, as we read and learn about what's going on around us it makes up able to experience life in new depths, with new appreciation, and an even greater sense of wonder and awe. Isn't it the astronomer who reveres the night sky for all it's glorious majesty? Or the physician who truly appreciates the wonder that is the human body? Indeed, reading and learning are the perfect precursors to a forever of drinking deeply from the experience that is life.
My point is this: Gandhi says that they're both important. Gandhi's advice on how to live life is to live in the dynamic tension of learning and experiencing; never forgetting that we can't be God's tools if we don't get off our fannies, and never forgetting that we can't be God's tools if we don't get our brains into gear.
I believe that as God reveals to Christians his ways, his heart, and his plan for the world, it will both encourage us to learn more about the world and experience more about world. Maybe if Gandhi were here to give a few words of advice to my generation he'd update his wise axiom from the 20th century to better fit the 21st. Perhaps he'd look at us and say, "Don't waste your short time upon this earth not surfing the big ones and climbing your Everests, but don't forget that there's big waves to be found in books and there's an Everest on every page!"
Man, that's good stuff. "An Everest on every page." Wow. I sure would like someone to say that about the books I write :) Beats "an anthill on every page" :)
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