Back to the Basics

When you stop and think about it, the skill of reading the English language is really very complex, yet even children as young as preschool age can begin to learn the names of the letters of the alphabet and their sounds.  I recently began tutoring a young boy who is struggling with reading, even though he is very intelligent and has great math skills and mechanical ability.  

As his mother observed us working together last week, she mentioned that she had worked with him on all these same skills in the past and she wondered why he was having such difficulty mastering those skills the way her other children had. I could spout a lot of educational and psychological jargon to explain his difficulties, but I believe that with the right teaching approach, he'll be able to master what he needs in order to be a competent reader.

In my own academic life, there were skills like that for me.  In the third grade, I had a terrible time figuring out how to read an analog clock.  Algebra was a nightmare for me, but as an adult when I did some team-teaching with a math teacher, I was finally developmentally ready to understand. We're all at different places with our readiness to learn things and there are always prerequisite skills that we need first in order to build new knowledge on the old. 

As I was thinking about going back to square one with this little fellow, I started comparing his reading journey to my spiritual journey right now.  Just as we all sometimes do, I have been through a period of time when I've been a little on the "spiritually lazy" side. As I've asked God to help me understand the roots of this hiccup in my spiritual walk, He's begun to show me that I need to go back to some basics of spiritual literacy - to study some things that I should have "mastered" and to see them in a fresh light. Just because I was raised on John 3:16 doesn't mean that I never need to read it again or to meditate on what it means to me and to those who I encounter in my life.  

I haven't used the algebra that I learned in many years, so I doubt if I'd be very successful with it now.  However, if there was a necessity for me to relearn it, I could go back to the beginning and be reminded of the principles, rules, and skills I'd need to put back into practice.  God is showing me that where I am weak, I need to repeat some lessons and that there is no shame in that.  The shame would be in maintaining false pride and insisting that everything was just as it should be.  All of us need to be reminded of Kingdom principles from time to time when we are not living them out in the way that we know is best.

We all need to maintain a teachable spirit and to ask the Holy Spirit, who is our Teacher, to make "lesson plans" for us - to teach us what He knows we need to learn.