You cannot thoroughly learn anything that will modify your life style or alter your behaviour without first of all experiencing it. Your imagination is also very important in the process of learning. The bible says ‘… and take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the spirit, which is the word of God’(Eph 6:17). This means that the sword of the spirit is the word of God but this is not a reference to the whole body of scriptures. This just shows that there is a scripture for every situation you find yourself and the Spirit of God brings it to your remembrance in your time of need. The only way this can happen is if you regularly commit the scriptures to heart. Its only what you know by heart that can be brought to your remembrance and it’s achieved through a constant study of the word of God. These scriptures will only come to you when you find yourself in certain situations and then suddenly what you are going through is defined by that particular scripture.
For instance, if you have studied the life of David or Abraham in the bible and then you find yourself in a particular business situation that you identify as similar to what one of them had experienced it shows that the process of learning is gradually taking place inside you other than just simply having an information about the scriptures. This is because you can see the lessons in their life that can help you get solutions in your business.
The process of learning here is about dissecting the specifics of what you are going through and then bringing them together into a body of concepts. Everything that you go through in life becomes a learning experience when a particular concept or pattern of life or a law in life has been overlooked. There is a saying that goes, “experience has taught us that man rarely learns anything from experience”. That is a true statement but it’s framed wrongly. There are people that have gone through certain things but have experienced nothing in what happened to them. That is why sometimes despite what some people have gone through they do not change. This shows that they never sat down to meditate on or dissect through what happened to them in other to get out the body of principles that is contained in that event. This is done by looking through the occurrence and finding out which law is at work, to see the mistakes made and then to reform by making changes in their approach to life after the whole experience.
The difference between a man of experience and a man that things just happened to is that a man of experience takes out time to meditate on what happened to him and then comes out with some form of illumination about certain concepts in life. After he now discovers all these concepts he will now be able to live a better life guided by this experience. But the other man sees or learns nothing from the experience, instead he continues living as before with the same mistakes and frustrations.
There is also another aspect where the person going through the experience does not learn any lessons, instead it is a friend or someone else observing from the outside that looks at the situation and gets an experience from it. This means the friend meditated upon the happenings in the life of somebody else, dissected it in his mind and then comes out with a body of principles. Using them to guide his life so as not to go through the same experience his friend went through. Sometimes, people tend to say they cannot learn from other people because they are different from them and their situations differ. That ideology is totally wrong. This is because if you cannot listen and learn from other people that means you are not reading the bible because the bible is not about our time or generation, so how then are you able to relate your present situation with it?
Learning is not limited to only one’s personal experience but it cuts across to other people’s experience as well. In everything that happens to anybody or in any nation there are universal laws and principles that are contained in it. Once a person who is a true student of life understands and meditates on them until he gets the general laws and principles for advancement, he will then be able to bring it into wherever he lives and then apply them till progress comes. Therefore do not limit yourself when learning instead have an open mind towards everything because you just might not know what lessons you will learn that will help you as you go through life.
“Poju Oyemade”