My 11-year old granddaughter is a reading/writing whiz, but she definitely doesn’t have one of those natural math minds. The concepts are hard for her. Retaining them is even harder. Since she has been getting further and further behind, her mom and I decided that it was time for some “summer school” to help her lock in some basics like her multiplication tables, fractions, decimals, etc.
So, instead of writing blog posts, I’ve been spending big chunks of every day trying to help this sweet little girl understand math. A month into it, it’s exciting to see her actually starting to be able to instantly recall some of the facts she has learned. No more elaborate finger counting, eye rolling, deep thinking. As much as she has fought the process, she is beginning to see the benefits of going back and exploring the things she hadn’t quite mastered before.
She isn’t the only one that has struggled because she didn’t “get” some important skills along the way. Many of us have struggled with life because we didn’t ever obtain the understanding and skills we needed. For many of us that struggle had nothing to do with scholastic endeavors. Our problem is that we weren’t taught or didn’t develop some of the basic life skills that would have helped us maneuver through life.
We may not know how to effectively resolve conflict. We may struggle with how to interact with people, or figure out who to trust. We may not have ever learned that we are valuable or acceptable. We may not know how to let go of resentments or other paralyzing thoughts. Even one of these or something similar can impede our ability to live an “overcoming” life.
Sometimes we were given bad data and wrong messages that kept us from learning what we needed. Other times the significant people in our lives didn’t know those things themselves, so they couldn’t pass them on. Sometimes traumatic events sidelined us and kept us from gaining skills we needed. No matter how it happened, many of us have holes in our development that are causing us problems today.
It is often these very things that make us particularly vulnerable to addiction and other destructive coping skills. We hope these things will fill in the gaps, and they often d0, for a while. Eventually there comes a time, though, when we realize that they didn’t solve a thing and, in fact, caused even more problems.
We, like my granddaughter, often have to go back and purposefully acquire the skills and understanding that we missed. It’s hard. The first step is to invite God to help us see what we lack and to guide us through the process of obtaining it. It is nearly impossible to do without His encouragement and nudging. Left to our own devices, we seldom want to do the hard work it requires, but, once we actually develop the healthy skills we need, it becomes much easier to let go of those secondary behaviors that we had been using as a substitute way to deal with life.
“Teach me what I cannot see; if I have done wrong, I will not do so again. — Job 34:32
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