Live and Learn
The other day, Joey was working in his garage and had a piece of wood spin around and hit his hand. It hurt, but he kept working and lo and behold it did it again. About that time he figured out he needed to position his screw different and change his angle so it wouldn’t happen a third time. As he relayed this story to me, I looked at him and said, “well, you live and you learn.” Then, I heard that still small voice…
We do live and hopefully we learn from what we lived through. God never promised we wouldn’t stumble; in fact it basically guaranteed we will stumble over and over and over again. The difference between falling alone and falling while walking with Jesus is each time we trip, He is there to pick us back up.
One of my favorite lessons my dad ever taught me is loving referred to as the “what did you learn” motto. Anytime I messed up as a kid or teen, in the aftermath I would have my dad looking at me asking what I learned from the mistake. It got to be so understood, Lee and I started seeing him in our head before we did something stupid and that vision stopped a lot of calamities. I feel like God does the same thing with us from time to time and time and again. We fall, he helps us up, then He looks us in the eye and asks, “what did you learn?”
If all we do is survive the trials, we are missing a great opportunity to learn from them. The greatest common lesson we can learn from our time on the ground is that we don’t get up by our own strength. That is why we can continue to rise over and over again. We don’t depend on our own ability to start over, but on the strength of God calling us to be better this time. By the grace and mercy of God, we may be knocked down, but we are not out of the fight. We will rise. We will learn. We will fall again. We will repeat the process. And hopefully, we will learn from each and every cycle.
Proverbs 24:16 “For the lovers of God may suffer adversity and stumble seven times, but they will continue to rise over and over again. But the unrighteous are brought down by just one calamity and will never be able to rise again.”
2 Corinthians 4:9 “We are persecuted by others, but God has not forsaken us. We may be knocked down, but not out.”
Philippians 3:13 “I don’t depend on my own strength to accomplish this; however I do have one compelling focus: I forget all of the past as I fasten my heart to the future instead.”
