So much of learning has nothing to do with the writer or speaker or teacher or coach or guru or spouse or best friend or anyone else. It has to do with some switch in our brains that is either opened or closed.
We can swim in an ocean of truth and doubt it all.
Maybe the switch is a decision to consider thoughts and ideas we dismissed earlier.
Maybe the decision is to be painfully brutally honest with ourselves come what may.
Maybe we decide our lives have become unmanageable, that the thoughts and ideas we so deeply believed in are flawed.
Before, we were afraid to risk changing our minds because to do so was to entertain the very real risk of throwing away what is propping us up.
Perhaps we don’t want to be called what we have called others who walked away from their comfortable lives:
Fools.
On the other hand, what if we have been just treading water, afraid to lose more than wanting to grow and discover?
What if our fear to disappoint is holding us back from deploying our gifts and talents - those known to us and hidden to others?
And what if we have to move ahead for God to guide our steps? Sitting on past achievements isn’t a good plan.
I guess that’s why the only way to find out anything for ourselves is to be willing to lose our lives for something of higher value.
And calling the crowd to him with his disciples, [Jesus] said to them, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel's will save it.
For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?
For what can a man give in return for his soul?
For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of Man also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”