Okay, help!

"Personally I'm always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught." (Winston Churchill)

2 They will help you learn to be wise, to accept correction, and to understand wise sayings. 3 They will teach you to develop your mind in the right way. You will learn to do what is right and to be honest and fair.4 These proverbs will make even those without education smart. They will teach young people what they need to know and how to use what they have learned. (Proverbs 1:2-4 ERV)

I am like Churchill - love learning, but sometimes kind of slow in the "being taught" realm! The stuff we are the slowest to learn can become the biggest and most rewarding lessons of our lives, though. As we look back over some of those lessons, we might find ourselves amazed at how God so faithfully kept teaching until we finally realized the truth he wanted us to see. It may just be the truth he wanted us to see was the ugliness of some sin in our lives - these are the hardest lessons for me to personally learn. Most of the time these are the things I'd rather sweep under the rug than to admit they need to be dealt with, but God isn't content to just let me skate by with a "well I tried to tell her" kind of answer!

We wouldn't want God to be slack in any manner when it comes to providing for our needs, helping us out when we need clarity, or opening doors for us when we have been trying to get something accomplished in our lives. Why would we want him to stop being as "attentive" to us, or show less concern in the areas where we need to have truth worked into our lives? We cannot have a double standard - either we want to know him fully, or we don't. There just isn't any chance that God is going to let us get away with areas of our lives where we are less than obedient. He will maintain his "teaching" until we begin to understand and embrace the lesson being taught.

Sometimes the lesson is sacrifice, at others it may be forgiveness. There are times the lesson isn't all that hard to learn, it is just that we don't always "want" to learn the lesson right then and there. It isn't that we don't need to learn it, it is that we aren't ready to let go of whatever we have been struggling with and let him help us figure it out. When I finally raised my hand as a kid in school, admitting I needed the teacher's help to understand a tough equation or find a solution to a troubling word problem, it opened the door to me actually seeing how to figure it out. It often takes us admitting we need to rely upon him a little in that area of our lives where we most need his training in order to open us up to receiving that help! Just sayin!