Daily writing prompt

Are you a lifelong learner?

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Am I a lifelong learner?

Yes. Next question.

I have to admit, I despise yes-or-no questions when they are pretending to be writing prompts. If the entire question can be answered before my coffee finishes dripping, we may not have reached the full depth of human reflection.

Maybe whoever writes these prompts should become a lifelong learner, at least in the area of writing better prompts. Add a little something. “Explain your answer.” “What keeps you curious?” “What have you learned lately?” Even a gentle “Why or why not?” would help.

But since the question is sitting there staring at me, I suppose I should do more than answer it like a teenager being interrogated at the dinner table.

Yes, I am a lifelong learner. At least, I hope I am.

I am not sure anyone should get to declare himself a lifelong learner as though the certificate has already been awarded. It seems more like something you prove day by day, mostly by staying curious, staying humble and admitting how much you still do not know.

To me, lifelong learning is not just about taking classes, reading books or collecting interesting facts. It is about staying teachable. It is about admitting there is still more to understand, more to notice, more to correct and more to become.

That part matters.

The opposite of lifelong learning is not ignorance. It is arrogance.

Ignorance can be fixed. Ignorance is just the condition of not knowing something yet. There is no shame in that. Every person on earth is ignorant about more things than he understands.

Arrogance is different. Arrogance says, “I already know enough.” Arrogance closes the book, walks out of the room and resents anyone who suggests there might be another way to look at things.

That is when learning stops. I hope I have not stopped.

In some ways, becoming a teacher later in life made it impossible for me to stop learning. I walked into a classroom at an age when many people are comfortably settled into their professions, and I had to figure out how to teach, how to manage a room, how to read students, how to adjust, how to explain things more clearly and how to survive the school year without losing my mind.

I am still working on several of those.

Teaching will humble you quickly. You can have the best lesson plan in the world, and a room full of eighth-graders will find the weak spot in it before you have finished taking attendance. You can think you explained something perfectly, only to realize twenty minutes later that half the class thought you were talking about something else entirely.

So you learn.

You learn to say it another way. You learn to listen better. You learn which battles matter and which ones are just noise wearing a backpack. You learn that students are not puzzles to solve as much as people to understand.

Writing has done the same thing for me.

Writing almost every day keeps me learning because it keeps me paying attention. Sometimes I sit down thinking I know what I believe about something, and halfway through the piece I realize I am still figuring it out. Sometimes I write my way into a memory I did not know I needed to revisit. Sometimes I start with a joke and end up somewhere much more serious than I expected.

That may be one of the reasons I keep doing it. Writing teaches me what I think. Faith teaches me how to examine what I think.

That is another kind of lifelong learning, and it is the most important one. Following Jesus does not mean I have mastered the lesson. It means I have agreed to keep learning from the Teacher. It means I keep returning to Scripture, prayer, worship, confession and grace because I am not finished yet.

Not even close.

I still have to learn patience. I still have to learn when to speak and when to be quiet. I still have to learn how to forgive more freely, listen more carefully, love more consistently and stop assuming my first reaction is always the correct one.

That last class meets every day, unfortunately.

I also learn in less serious ways. I learn about bourbon, one sip and one bottle at a time. I learn about football officiating every time I put on stripes and try to see everything happening on a field where twenty-two people are moving at once and at least one coach is convinced I missed something obvious.

Sometimes he is right.

I learn technology because technology keeps changing just fast enough to make me feel old and just useful enough that I cannot ignore it. I learn from movies, music, books, conversations, mistakes, sermons, students, family, friends and the occasional WordPress prompt that could have used one more sentence.

Life keeps offering classes. Some are electives. Some are required. Some I would not have signed up for if I had been given the choice.

Marriage teaches me. Fatherhood teaches me. Grandfatherhood teaches me. Grief teaches me. Disappointment teaches me. Aging teaches me. Love teaches me. Failure teaches me, usually with more repetition than I would prefer.

And the Lord keeps teaching me through all of it.

So, yes, I am a lifelong learner.

But not because I am unusually wise or endlessly curious or walking around with a stack of library books and a freshly sharpened pencil behind my ear.

I am a lifelong learner because I still need to be taught. I still need to grow, to be corrected, to be surprised and to be humbled. 

And apparently, I still need to learn how to answer a yes-or-no question without turning it into an entire essay.

But that’s probably why the prompt needed a follow-up question in the first place.