Sometimes I forget the words and how to say them, how to write them, how to even start a blog post or finish a conversation. I forget what I read in my morning devotions, what insight or epiphany I thought was from God last week, or what important issue I was going to talk with child XY or Z about . I forget how to use words to communicate.
This is the clean slate God keeps giving me.
I still write the words and say the things, when they come. Communication is becoming more important than ever to me, and it happens in more ways than I ever thought possible. This learning to talk is part of my continuing education, part of the stripping down and rebuilding I cycle through with God.
I wrote the following article for Fathom Magazine and I hope you’ll find something in it to spark your own educational endeavors:
“I just spent half an hour reading an article about reading. It probably should have taken me fifteen minutes, but looking up words and re-reading whole paragraphs takes time. I had to muscle through.
It was an article linked on Twitter by someone far brighter and more educated than myself—someone who probably read it and fully comprehended it in ten minutes or less—and the premise was this: our brains are changing due to our highly-digital reading diets, and the skimming we learn to do online is diminishing our capacity for empathy, insight, and discernment, not to mention our aptitude and appetite for long-form reading.
None of this was surprising or entirely new information, but reading it (and the irony of my struggle to read it) was just one more reminder of my need for continued education, with real books and slow work. ”
