Episode #272 The Classroom of Daily Life: Learning to See God Everywhere – Unforced Rhythms of Grace

Hey, friend, it's Jen. When you hear the word study, what comes to mind? Do you think of past school years and tests? Or maybe piles of books that you want to read and pens and highlighters and sticky notes? No matter what it is, I want to talk about a different way to approach study today, and you don't have to be bookish to actually enjoy it.

Now I personally love learning. I love reading. I joke with my husband, Jared, all the time that if college was free, I would never stop. I would always just be taking more courses. And of course he calls me a nerd! But we don't only get to study with books open. You know that I'm rereading the book Celebration of Discipline by Richard Foster, and we're in the discipline of study right now.

And he's really broadening my perspective of it because books and lectures and classroom environments are only one aspect of studying. But for a lot of us, including me, I've really only thought of study that way.

But listen to what Foster says. He says, "In study there are two 'books' to be studied: verbal and nonverbal. Books and lectures, therefore, constitute only half the field of study, perhaps less."

What's the other half?

Foster says it's "the world of nature and, most important, the careful observation of events and actions."

This means that some of our most profound learning doesn't happen with a book open. And I thought it'd be helpful to talk about it today in the context of drawing closer to God and wanting to hear his voice. Because we get to connect with God with our Bibles open. The Bible is one of the clearest ways that God speaks with us, but that is not the only way that we get to be a student of the word or of the Lord. We get to go through daily life with God, and that includes being intentional to study life as we live it.

This is something that Jesus clearly understood and modeled for us. Think about all of the times when he offered parables to his disciples and to the crowds that we're following with him. He's like, Hey, look around you. The kingdom of God is revealed in seeds and in soil, in yeast and dough, and lost coins, and wayward sons.

So often he would give them examples of circumstances that were familiar to their everyday life as an opportunity to enlighten them about who God is and what he's like, and what God's kingdom is like here on earth and also in heaven. And the same opportunities exist for us every day, which is incredible to think about. We get to be students of life as we go through our routines and our chores, as we raise children, as we go to our places of employment. We get to be those who notice how God is at work in and through us and in the world around us.

And this even extends to looking at human interactions and cultural patterns and even our own internal responses to the things that happen to us in day-to-day life. Foster encourages us to "pay attention" to the world around us—to become students of nature, relationships, institutions, and ourselves. Each becomes a text where God's truths can be discovered.
I love this perspective, and I've talked in different episodes past about how I'm learning to approach myself and my own feelings and thoughts and responses with compassionate curiosity, to notice how I'm feeling or responding to something, and to be curious about that in myself. I wonder why that hurts that way. I wonder why my thoughts or responses came out in that way. And in doing so, I get to reflect and know myself better, and I get to reflect and know God better too.

I remember a specific circumstance that was like this and this was a few years ago when my oldest son, Dillon, was probably around four or five. He was practicing his handwriting and so he was writing down the people in our family that he loved. I love mommy, I love daddy, I love Connor. I love Dillon.

And so I'm sitting there with him as he's practicing and I point out, oh, you wrote yourself, And he goes, yeah, mom, I love myself. Don't you love yourself? In that moment, I wasn't like, oh, let me be a student of life. But I had an opportunity right in front of me to reflect on that question in a moment that wasn't planned and I stepped back to consider. Wow. I don't know that I would think about myself in that way. I want to feel towards myself, that kind of love, and that prompted me to actually go to bring that topic to God and be like, God, where are there areas where that's hard for me, because that's not as easy for me as it is for my young son. And so in that ordinary parenting moment, God was teaching me something really profound that was helpful in my own journey of faith.

I wonder what you might learn if you approached life and the circumstances of your day as a field of study. This doesn't replace scripture, of course, it's just giving us living illustrations of biblical truths. In Romans 1:20, Paul tells us, "For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made."

Well, friends, the world we live in, and the humans we engage in in this world are made by God. We are part of his creation and his invisible qualities are on display for us that we can study them as we go about life.

So here's a question you can take to God today:

God, what are you teaching me through the ordinary circumstances of my life right now?

Have a good talk.

And if you've been encouraged by this content, please share it with a friend and help them grow in their conversational relationship with God too!

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