I have some experience teaching kids; I’ll just start off by saying that. I’ve taught at Bible study and Sunday School for several years, not to mention homeschooling ~ my own children, but also other kids in various team-teaching and co-op situations.
It can be very rewarding. I have enjoyed some great discussions on literature, and fruitful, educational conversations about the Bible.
But it can also be frustrating. Kids (and teens) can be fidgety, talkative, and sometimes not talkative enough (… Bueller… Bueller…)
But I decided the other day that really, what it comes down to, is the desire to learn. it is difficult ~ and discouraging ~ to try to teach someone whose mind is somewhere else. If you want to learn, you are paying attention and thinking about the topic at hand. If you don’t care about learning, your mind is probably somewhere else.
After this recent experience of mine, teaching people who didn’t care about learning, I started wondering how often I’m like that with God. How often is He trying to teach me something, but my mind is elsewhere?
It’s not even that my mind is someplace bad. I’m not thinking about anything He wouldn’t want me thinking about; just my schedule or my grocery list or what’s for dinner or something. But I’m thinking it probably makes me less teachable. There might be times when my mind could be thinking about Scripture, or even when I should be more “in the moment,” if you will. Asking Him, “what do You want me to learn from this situation?”
I don’t think it’s something He’d criticize me for. He knows I need to plan my schedule, make out my grocery list and plan dinner. But I also think that there’s something to learn everyday, and if I’m not wanting to learn it, I might not. You know the old saying, “If the devil can’t make you bad, He’ll make you busy.” It goes for the mind, too.
Light Expectations 