Thursday, March 17, 2005
The Necessity of Pain
You know, one day I'm going to write an entire book on all of the things I've learned about God teaching college courses. Over the past two years, I've gotten the chance to teach three different classes here at Tech. Here's one interesting thought from that - think of it as an excerpt from the as-yet-unpublished book on the topic. It occurred to me the other day that, at the half way point of this semester, there are some things the students I teach are learning well and other things they aren't. Some bad habits they've gotten rid of, others that they are holding on to rather tenaciously. It seems to me that sometimes the only way to get them to stop doing some of things I'm trying to teach them to stop doing is to hit them in the gradebook. If I warn them about something, some will listen and others won't. If I start taking off points for it then everyone learns pretty quick. Now, I don't particularly enjoy deducting points (it wasn't that long ago that I was the student losing points) but I've learned that I'm not doing them any favors by giving them a grade they didn't earn. And so the lesson that I'm taking away from my observation is this: Sometimes the only thing that we as humans respond to is pain (in all its varied forms). Let me frame the scope of my arguement, not all pain is punishment and its certainly not all caused by God - we do our fair share of the causing. But within this, I have learned to understand the value of pain (or perhaps a better term, discipline) in my life. Hebrews 12:7 says, "Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as sons." The truth is that God's not out to get me, He's not against me, and YES, He does have better things to do than pester you. But I know that God has a vision for the kind of person that I could be and spurs me on to make the vision a reality everyday by whatever means necessary. What so many people think God does out of hate, He does because He loves us. Truly, its easier to believe that at some times than it is others but we must, nonetheless, persevere in that belief all the time.
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That's why we have police officers. Rule #1 of the world: People are stupid. Hehe, that's cynical, but unfortunately true for the most part. If you get out of line, a cop's gonna beat it into you to Not Do That Again, because people rarely stop what they're doing with only a verbal warning. God's like, "try not to do that," and you're like, "okay, except this thing I'll do anyway," and God's like, "Dude, I said don't do that because that shows a lack of faith in Me," and you're like, "yeah you're right God, I'm sorry but this thing that I'm doing is cool," and God's like, "No, it's not, actually..." and you do it again, and God's like, "...okay, you asked for it," and He taketh away to get you to see His point.
There's far too many things about the nature of humans that I don't get, but that's probably a consequence of being human. Hehe, weird.
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