Learn Your Way Out of Every Problem

Rick Warren has a great saying to pastors, he says, “you teach your way out of every problem” which I think is excellent wisdom. Whenever problems and trials come, one of the best (and most difficult) things to do is to stop worrying and to continue learning. There is an inheirant humility in learning where you put yourself under wise teaching and counsel and humbly take advice because you realize you are not at the best place to make all of your own decisions. I believe that this is the best used of time when you feel like things are falling apart. The phrase: Your either growing or your dying, there ain’t no third direction, is a good truism that supports this idea. What’s funny right now is that I feel like I have too much to read, and I feel overwhelmed at how much I want to learn and how little discipline I have currently to enact that learning. This is a list of the books that I’m currently reading or would like to be reading (not including The Bible): Desiring God, Disappointment With God, Good to Great, Searching For God Knows What, The Road Less Traveled, Boundaries in Dating, and several more that I can’t even remember right now. It’s not that these are long books, it’s more that they are deep and gut-wrenching books that require a humble heart and time for the truth to sink in. I hope that in year or so I will be able to say that I have taken the time and disciplined myself to read all of these books. I know that they have important truths to reveal and the time that it takes to digest those truths will be well worth the sacrifice. But that’s just what it is, a sacrifice. It’s pure discipline, it’s not all that fun most of the time. But what’s important is we pay the price to allow discipline to fully run it’s course, then we will really develop the character it takes to face anything that God has set before us.