Learning Lessons

A few weeks ago, I had dinner with a group of ladies. It was really nice to get away from school, from papers, from grading. One of the ladies had made homemade Chicken Tikka Masala, and, if there is anything that will lure me out of the house, it's Chicken Tikka Masala. In fact, if I ever seem hesistant about going out, you might just tell me that we're going to have Indian food, and that will turn my mood right around.

Anyways, the food was so incredibly good, and the ladies were, as always, great to talk to. In the course of our conversation, we started talking about prayer. Namely, we started talking about how we learn things through prayer that we never thought we could learn. And, in some cases, we learn things that we never thought we needed to learn. I'm not saying which of us learns lessons she never thought she needed to learn, but I will say that she's a PhD student, studying Philosophy of Education, and she may or may not make the best oatmeal raisin cookies in the whole world.

Okay. I confess. It's me. You who know me know that I hate, hate, hate admitting I don't know something. I will actually lie and pretend like I know what I'm talking about. Conversely, whenever people admit to me that they don't know something, I wonder how they get through life not knowing everything. You would think that as an educator, I'd be more open to being educated, but it just doesn't work like that for me.

But, I do need to learn things, and as the ladies were saying, sometimes the best way to learn things is to pray for God to teach you about them. However, the overwhelming consensus was:

Be careful what you pray for.

Sounds familiar, right? We so often say, "Be careful what you wish for." The difference is, our wishes usually just end where they started, in our own minds. However, when we pray--for guidance, for assurance, for help--we are actually praying to God, and He really does answer those prayers. And, sometimes, He may make us wonder why on earth we ever, ever wanted to learn the lesson we asked Him to teach us.

I'm just saying, when we pray for patience, we can expect that we'll soon find ourselves needing patience more than we ever have before. We may find ourselves waiting on things for longer than we've ever waited, standing in more lines than we ever thought possible, caught in traffic for what seems like hours. Will we learn the lesson of patience? Oh yes. But it won't be in the way we expected God to teach it to us. We expect that, like taking a pill or getting a shot, God will instantly change us. Or that He'll fill us with whatever virtue we feel like we're lacking.

You know, like when your car needs gas, you fill it up, and then it runs just fine. That's what we want. The problem is, learning lessons like patience shouldn't be like filling up the car. The car will eventually run out of gas and need to be filled again, but when we're asking God to teach us a virtue, we're asking for a complete life change, something that will alter the way we think and interact with those around us. And, that's just not something that can be done like a quick fill-up. We have to undergo times which require patience in order to develop patience, and that's how He teaches us.

And, that's why we ladies (half-jokingly) thought we should be careful about what we pray for. I've been thinking about it though, and I realized that part of the problem is that sometimes we don't even know what we're asking for. For example, I pray that I'll be more loving. Feel free to smile, laugh, roll your eyes. I do. Seriously. But, I do have an awful time loving people, and, quite honestly, I often have an awful time loving God, so that's what I pray to learn.

I think it's a good thing to pray about--not just to love, but to love as God loves. I mean, loving seems simple enough, really. Romantically, it's all about poems and candy and cards and stuff. Or, with friendships, it's about finding people who have the same interests and desires that you do and creating some little world based on those things, where you all get along because you share so much in common. Unfortunately, that's not love as God loves. And, when I think of how so many of us cling to those concepts of love, I imagine God looking down at us all, with our very shallow definitions of love and saying,

"That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all."

Yes, in this image of God, He quotes from T.S. Eliot's poetry, but I can't think of anything better to capture what God must think when He looks at how we treat love, how we fail so miserably at times to be truly loving to those around us, because love, as God created it, is something quite different. And, when we turn to God for an understanding of what love is, I think we'd be surprised at how much it has to do with self-sacrifice. That definition of love is tough. It requires commitment and a total lack of self-interest.

The other day, I was reading something about God's love, and the author was saying that a true image of God's love could be seen in the way Jesus chose His disciples, specifically Judas Iscariot. Think about this situation. Jesus was God on earth. As such, He was omniscient, all-knowing. So, when He chose Judas as his disciple, He did so knowing that He would be betrayed by Judas. Now, we can easily say that Jesus necessarily had to choose Judas, as Judas played an integral part in turning Jesus over to the authorities and, thereby, leading to the crucifixion. That makes plenty of sense.

What doesn't make sense to me is that God would choose to fulfill the prophesy of the crucifixion in such a way that would necessitate Jesus having Judas as a disciple, someone who Jesus would interact with for the three years of His ministry, someone with whom He would speak and eat and just be friends. Only to be betrayed.

But, I think it almost had to be like that so that we could understand Jesus' love. Jesus' love is such that, even knowing the betrayal that would come, He chose Judas. He chose not to exclude Judas. He chose Judas to be one of His disciples and one of His friends.

And, again, I have to ask, "What am I getting myself into, asking to love as God loves?"

Because praying to love as God loves means asking for your heart to be opened in ways you never knew it could. It means feeling more than you ever knew you could. It means looking at people you never would have noticed before and wondering what their stories are, wondering what their hurts are. And, sometimes, you'd just rather watch TV or play Dolphin Olympics on your computer than interact with people. Because people are annoying and needy and sometimes, quite frankly, incredibly boring. But, then again, sometimes I'm all of those things too, and God still loves me.

So, it's true that you must be careful what you pray for God to teach you because He really will teach you the lessons you long to learn. And it won't be a short lesson, and it might not even be that pleasant. However, when I find that I just don't understand something, like patience or love or peace, I feel like there must be a need for me to learn that thing. And, in that case, perhaps I should be just as mindful of those things I avoid praying about. They may be the lessons I most need to learn.