I'm taking a class on Sunday mornings called "Grasping God's Word," using the textbook of the same name. It's about digging deeper into the Scriptures.
The first four weeks have taught us to observe what we're seeing, noticing pronouns and lists and the tense of verbs and conjunctions and cause & effect and contrasts, etc. In chapter 2 we learned to look at sentences. In chapter 3 we learned to look at paragraphs. In chapter 4 we learned to look at discourses.
So I carefully listed the various things I'm supposed to look for on pretty colored index cards, and I've been using them while doing my homework. But I've been struggling. I can see why the authors want us to do these things, but something just wasn't clicking. In class Sunday I mentioned my index cards, and there was some good-natured teasing about legalism and needing to shred or burn those cards. But how else, I wondered, could I remember all that I need to look for? Especially since I didn't seem to be "getting it."
Then halfway through the class, I had an "aha moment." I'm an intuitive writer rather than an analytical one. I feel my stories far more than I see them. I create by the seat-of-the-pants (pantser for short) rather than plotting/outlining in advance. Analytical and plotting workshops make me want to bang my head on the desk and cry, "Mercy!" When I try to create that way, I freeze up entirely. My brain goes dead. I had to learn this about my creative process and become okay with it.
In that "aha moment" during the class on Sunday, I realized that I was trying to apply the textbook study techniques in an analytical-seeing-plotting approach rather than an intuitive-feeling-pantser approach. No wonder I was freezing up and not getting it. And I was reminded that it's okay to be me, to learn the way I was created to learn. God made me this way. He made each one of us unique and special, down to the smallest details.
For You formed my inward parts;
You wove me in my mother’s womb.
I will give thanks to You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
Wonderful are Your works,
And my soul knows it very well.
My frame was not hidden from You,
When I was made in secret,
And skillfully wrought in the depths of the earth;
Your eyes have seen my unformed substance;
And in Your book were all written
The days that were ordained for me,
When as yet there was not one of them.
(Psalm 139:13-16)
I'm going to open my textbook and learn and think the way God gifted me. Oh, and I got rid of those index cards.
~robin
