Yesterday I was able to sit in a church class for girls 11-18 that was being taught by an 18 year old girl. I just love her. She is passionate, funny, kind, and willing to be open about herself. She did a really great job leading a discussion about receiving guidance from God.
At the end of the class, she wanted to issue a challenge to everyone so they could apply what we talked about to their actual lives. She opened up the room for suggestions, and someone talked about a challenge they knew of that involved studying a certain event in our church’s history where a leader received guidance from God.
Good idea, right? And I wasn’t going to say anything because I had already made a couple of comments, and I was trying to not be one of those adult leaders who takes over…….but…..I just couldn’t help myself.
The whole point of the lesson was receiving guidance from God. And instead of trying that out for themselves, they were just going to go read about someone else doing it? Learning and studying are great….but it doesn’t really mean much if you aren’t taking what you learn and actually using it in your own life.
So I had to comment. I couldn’t waste an opportunity like this to encourage these girls to have their own experience receiving guidance from God. I said that I fully supported learning and studying, but that the whole point of learning and studying was so that we might be better able to have guidance in our lives too. We need to know how to ask God for guidance and how to recognize His response. I said I would love for everyone to study the history, but to then decide something very specific that they wanted to ask God to guide them on. And then pray and see what happens. Go through the actual process of trying to receive guidance.
It is so much easier to learn and study about something than it is to actually apply it in our life. I can study and learn all about how to effectively create habits, but it means nothing if I don’t actually use what I’ve learned to create good habits in my life. You can read all about how much exercise benefits your health, but it doesn’t do you any good unless you actually start exercising.
So prepare yourself by studying and learning, but don’t neglect the most important part of applying what you learn in your life.
Work In Progress 