Always Learning

When I was in high school, many moons ago, I had this crush (who I happen to be married to now) and I wanted to learn a song for her. I was the epitome of a cheesy hopeless romantic. I loved this song called “Remember to Breathe” by Dashboard Confessional. I decided that this was the one. Simple 3 chords or so on the guitar, doable. Now, understand I was emo. To the fullest. Like I can’t even look back at my life and say it was a phase…it was who I was. So I learned it. Now, I’m married. I’m sure the two are connected in some way. Ask her.

This music has taken another role in my life now. Whenever our oldest son Benny, gets emotional or whinny, I will pull out my repository of emo music and sing a sonnet to him. Blink 182’s “I miss you”, “Vindicated” by Dashboard, “Cute without the E” by Taking Back Sunday, and the list goes on. I will sing it to him in his moments of emotional distress. Sometimes it works and he starts smiling. other times he sits in the floor and embraces the music staring out the window with hair in his face. I’m still learning.

Learning is something I have had to teach myself to love. And it’s different when you learn to love learning.

There’s a medieval monk named Jean Leclercq who wrote a book called “The Love of Learning and the Desire for God”. It’s not exactly beach reading. But the central idea reframed my life when I first encountered it. Leclercq argued that for the monks of the Middle Ages, learning was not a duty to be discharged or a credential to be earned. It was an act of love. A form of desire. You studied Scripture and theology and the great texts of the Church the same way you pursued God; not to accumulate information but to be transformed by encounter. Learning and longing were the same movement.

That idea rewired something in me. Because I spent a lot of my early life treating learning as a transaction. Get the information. Pass the test. Produce the result. Learning was something you did to get somewhere else. And I hated it. Somewhere along the way, through a doctorate I wasn’t sure I could finish, through years of preaching and pastoring and sitting with people in their hardest moments, through homeschooling three kids around a table every morning watching Holly, I started to understand what Leclercq was describing.

Learning is not the destination. It is the posture of someone who is still being formed. We homeschool our kids. And I’ll be honest, some mornings it is an exercise in patience that would test the saints. (It tests me, anyway. Holly handles it with considerably more grace than I do and I’m far less involved.) But what I keep coming back to is this: we are not just trying to fill our kids with information. We are trying to show them what it looks like to love learning. To stay curious. To ask the next question. To sit with something difficult long enough that it opens up. To understand that being a learner is not a stage you pass through on the way to knowing; it is a way of being in the world forever.

David understood this. Sitting with Psalm 25 lately and this has been my prayer:

“Show me your ways, Lord, teach me your paths. Guide me in your truth and teach me, for you are God my Savior, and my hope is in you all day long.” (Psalm 25:4–5)

Show me. Teach me. Guide me.

Three requests and all of them learning postures. All of them aimed not at information but at formation. David is not asking God to download correct theology into his head. He is asking to be led. To be shown the road from the inside of the journey rather than from a map. To be taught the truth not as a proposition but as a path walked in relationship with the God who is the Truth. That is Leclercq’s monk.

That is the homeschool table on a Tuesday morning. That is me still figuring out how to pastor in a new place, learning what it means to shepherd these specific people in this specific town with these specific needs. And that is Benny sitting on the floor with his hair in his face, feeling something too large for words, while his ridiculous emo dad sings Taking Back Sunday at him.

We are all still learning.

The best pastors I know are the ones who never stopped being students. Not because they lack confidence but because they understand that the God they are leading people toward is inexhaustible. You cannot reach the bottom of Him. You cannot exhaust the Scripture. You cannot arrive at a place where there is nothing left to discover about the love that created the universe and descended into flesh and walked out of a tomb.

Gregory of Nyssa called it “epektasis”: the soul’s endless stretching toward God. Not restlessness. Not dissatisfaction. The joy of a love that always has more to give than you have capacity to receive. Learning as worship and study as desire. The more you know the more you understand how much more there is to know and somehow that is not discouraging, it is the most energizing thing in the world.

So I’m learning. And I desire to always be doing so.

Guitar chords for a girl who became my wife. Emo lyrics for a son who feels things deeply. Greek words in texts two thousand years old that keep opening into something new. How to love a congregation I am still getting to know. How to sit at a table with my kids and model what it looks like to stay curious about God and the world He made. And how to love my family well in all of it.

Show me your ways. Teach me your paths.

That prayer never gets old. Because the One we are asking never runs out of paths to show us.

And apparently neither does the Dashboard Confessional discography. Which, for the record, holds up.