daily java

Daily Java:

Commit yourself to instruction; listen carefully to words of knowledge. (Proverbs 23:12)

I was listening to someone talk about the Bible the other day and they didn’t know what they were talking about. The worst part of it was that with a little study, they would have.

I guess that was the worst part. Maybe the worst part was that they were willing to go out in public and say things that were not true and didn’t know the difference.

A man I worked with thirty years ago had this problem. He would hear something and it sounded relatively logical to him so he would use it in his sermons. The problem was that it was blatantly wrong.

For instance, he said that the word Gentile means literally dog. It doesn’t take more than thirty seconds to read in a book that Gentile means nation and it is the word we get our word ethnic from. He was wrong and if you knew anything you knew he was. So he looked foolish.

The writer of Proverbs says to commit yourself to instruction. In other words, be a learning person. Keep on learning, keep on studying, keep on being fresh. Don’t say foolish things under the guise of scholarship. If you are going to pretend to knowledge, then be knowledgeable.

Listen to people. You can learn from anyone no matter how old you are. The real student does this. He always questions, always checks. He will ask anyone no matter who they are or their age if he doesn’t know what they are talking about. He has a thirst for knowledge.

To this kind of person, knowledge is not something they accumulated back in school and now just automatically have. It is something that is life-long, continual. And it is something that is a joy, to learn new things.

Do it. Make yourself a learning person and listen.

daily java

Daily Java:

Intelligent people are always ready to learn.
    Their ears are open for knowledge. (Proverbs 18: 15)

When I was a little boy, my family and I were somewhere listening to somebody talk about something. No idea what or where, but it was some kind of information thing, like a museum or exhibit. One of the group asked a question that was a little on the dumb side, but at the same time one I didn’t know the answer to. You know the kind of question: it had a simple answer, and no one wanted to ask it for fear of looking silly, but at the same time, no one really knew the answer.

The person giving the demonstration answered the question and all of a sudden, the whole group was more educated.

I commented that it was a silly question to my father, and he told me that the person who had asked was an extremely intelligent person who had a lot of education. In other words, he was smart enough to look a little dumb in order to increase his knowledge.

How many times do we sit through “lessons” in which we do not learn a key part? And how often do we go without asking for simple clarification for fear of looking foolish? Which means that we stay foolish for fear of looking foolish.

Intelligent people want to know things. There is the old adage “knowledge is power” and to a large extent it is true. Knowledge is no good whatever if you do not know enough to use it.

I suppose that is one reason why I ask people so many questions. I want to know more. I always have. And the sad thing I found much of my college “experience” to be useless because the information I learned was for the most part rote and worthless. And I also found, oddly enough, that many of the questions I asked of my college professors they did not know. In fact, I found that on many of the subjects we were studying, my knowledge was broader than theirs and they had graduate degrees.

I guess they had gone through their educational process doing just enough to get by and to get a degree, where I was trying to learn something.

That doesn’t make me smarter than anyone else or anything like that. But I guess it makes me a little odd to some. I always ask. I always want to know.

It irritates some and I don’t know why. Most people, I suppose, just want to live and let live, to just go through their lives with the minimum effort and “not make waves” by asking questions.

I always applied that same thing to people. I want to know about them, so I ask questions. My son said one day that I asked people entirely too many questions. Then he said, on the other hand, I know more about people than most do. I said that was the point. I want to know things.

My children do not share this quest for knowledge. I have always been a voracious reader, even to the point of reading the dictionary and encyclopedias. I even read ingredients on boxes and cans. I just want to know.

It has done me no real good, I will have to admit. I have accomplished little from the great amount of knowledge I have accumulated. And as I get older, I am losing a lot of that knowledge. The things I learned when I was 30 do not matter many times when I am 62, and I guess the mental hard drive is in the process of being overwritten.

If I had it to do again (a theme that seems to be dominant for this part of my life), I would ask more questions, go to school more, read more, searched more, learned more things, keep my ears open for knowledge.

there are those who learn all their lives

Commit yourself to instruction; listen carefully to words of knowledge.

(Proverbs 23:12)There are those who learn all their lives. They never stop. I guess that I am probably one. I love the accumulation of new knowledge.

What do I do with it? Many times, nothing. I just gain it. My wife is amused at it sometimes. I just seem to have a never ending thirst to know new things. Even though it may be of absolutely no use to me, I still will go out of my way to learn it.

And I always picked up stuff fast, too. Languages, ideas, music, philosophies – they just came naturally to me.

I suppose they do because I search them out. I don’t know of anyone who accidentally learns stuff as a matter of course, that is smart by accident. I know you get a lot of your life knowledge accidentally (don’t touch the heater, don’t hold a knife by the blade, etc) but in general, people who are learned set out to be so.

It wasn’t necessarily a conscious decision to learn stuff. Most of the time it is just the way a person is wired.

For instance, I will go out of my way to learn new things. My wife, on the other hand, enjoys hearing about the new things I have discovered but will not pursue them herself. She likes to know the new things, but puts little effort into the learning.

Most people are like that, I think. The odd bit of weird knowledge is interesting but the life-long pursuit isn’t.

There is a book I have that is called “The Bathroom Reader.” It is designed to go in the bathroom to read at the odd times you are trapped in there. It is trivia, completely and utterly useless trivial information. It is fun to read, but useless to life.

I pore through it and others like it. It is almost a disease with me. And for the most part, I do well in Scrabble and Trivial Pursuit and things like that because of that tendency.

Most of the things I learn quite frankly do not stick. But it doesn’t matter. It is the learning.

The same with the child of God. To be pleasing, the child of God has to have a thirst for the knowledge of God. That is not to say that you are just memorizing scripture. Memorizing scripture does not necessarily mean you know God. It just means you know a lot of scripture by heart.

Unless you use that scripture in your service to God, all it becomes is trivia. It has to be used.

Commit. Listen carefully. Know what God wants and do it.

i love watching mothers and little children

I love watching mothers and little children. I believe that there is nothing that is more beautiful, especially in context, than a mother with her little child.

She will be walking in the store, talking to the child, maybe even asking it questions about various vegetable choices or sale items, as if it really understood.

Of course, by talking to the child like that, she is preparing it for hearing real things, for listening to real language. There is nothing worse than talking baby talk to a child. It needs to hear real words.

In fact, studies show that the more you talk to a child like a real person, the more the chance that the child will grow up to have greater intelligence.

I also love to see a child and have it see me. Today, I was waiting for Ella to have her haircut in the mall, and a mother came by pushing a little bitty girl.

I saw her about the same time she saw me. She was looking at me in that way that only little children have. So I wiggled my mustache. I can do kind of the same thing with my upper lip that Samantha on Bewitched could do. Only with a mustache, of course. She couldn’t do that.

The little girl watched in amazement. That was the most amazing thing she had ever seen. No one had ever done that before. Then she screwed her mouth and tried her best to replicate the gesture. She couldn’t, of course, but then her mother took her away.

I love to see a child like that. It is a moment between me and the child alone. Nobody else. The child, more than likely, will not remember it, except as part of the visual fabric of the day.

When I saw her later, you could tell she remembered me but didn’t know why. She had seen too many other astonishing things in the interim.

Children see so much that after a while the look on their faces almost resembles astonishment more than anything else.

Can you imagine seeing new thing after new thing and then off to the next? One thing after another, moving along as if on a life conveyor belt. The child become somewhat calloused after a while. It just sits and watches. It is still all astonishing, but it becomes a spectator.

When I went to Germany in the army, I felt like that. And I had a little understanding of what it was like to be a child, unable even to read the signs for the bathroom. I would walk and look, one new thing after another.

Of course, I had a framework to put it in. I also had a certain gift for languages and could, after a time, figure out some of the signs. After all, it doesn’t take a lot of brains to figure out that toiletten and toilets are the same.

But a child has no contextual framework. Everything is new, and because they are being pushed along at someone else’s speed, everything is equal.

Brand new people, ready to learn and take their place in the unending line of humanity. And my mustache plays a little part.