We have a plethora of lessons to learn. Here are some of them …

Have you learned anything lately?

Or are your feeling like life has become a “lesson overload”?

With political strife, a global pandemic, an important focus on racism, and riots and looting, the world is in a significant process of change. That means there are a lot of lessons we need to learn!

But will we learn them?

Scott Free Clinic lost its workspace, wifi access, and use of laptop in March due to the pandemic, and we’re only now able to slowly get that back. That has provided us with a few months to do a lot of observing and listening, engaging in many conversations, and ministering to a mass of people, pastors, and churches in need. In the process, I’ve made notes on some of the lessons ripe for our learning. They include:

INDIVIDUALLY
We need God every single day. So many — even many who profess to be followers of Jesus Christ — live each day of their lives as if they don’t need God, but that He’s handy to have around when life is more than we can handle. Well, if we should have learned anything now from the past few months, it’s that we need God every day of our lives. We’re much smaller and fragile than we often think, and God is far more greater and awesome than we recognize each day. At a time when life seems more brittle, we can more easily see and acknowledge that God made us, sustains us, and holds our lives in His hand. We need to start every with Him, rely on Him throughout each day, and learn to consciously make Him our constant companion.

What is really important. When you have to involuntarily spend your time at home for months (or even if you don’t, working in a pandemic is different), we suddenly see many things we thought were “important” really aren’t, and some of the things we routinely take advantage of or give little consideration to are more valuable than previously acknowledged.

Just how shallow we are or aren’t. There has been a remarkable amount of complaining the last few months. Much of that complaining has been about our comfort or lack thereof, our capacity to keep ourselves entertained, and a reduced ability to feed our desires — largely, to do whatever we want, when we want, the way we want. Fortunately, the pandemic has also provided expansive new opportunities to love and serve others in the name of Christ, something some have displayed to God’s glory.

How much we lie. Many people have made a lack of time their primary excuse for not doing some of the most important things in life, like serving God, loving others, spending time studying the Bible, etc. But with a sudden supply of much more personal time, little (or none of it) has gone toward those things we claimed we would do if only we had time.

RELATIONSHIPS
The real quality of our relationships. One of the saddest things we’re seeing is that many people have a poorer quality marriage and/or family relationships than they previously admitted. Being forced to stay home and spend all your time with your spouse has shown there are too many marriages out there where husband and wife don’t like or respect each other very much. And many of those parents who for years proclaimed they “adore” their children can’t wait to send them back to school or otherwise relieve them of so much parental responsibility. For others, their marriages have become more intimate and their families have grown stronger because they have used some of their new free time to nurture their relationships.

Every relationship must be nurtured. Most relationships (of any kind) don’t “fail” because people “grow apart,” they fail because we fail to nurture them. In a global pandemic where social-distancing is demanded, we have to work harder than before to nurture our relationships; we have to be far more intentional about stepping into people’s lives, and most of us weren’t very good at that before the pandemic swept into our lives.

That we need each other more than we thought. There’s an old saying that you don’t really know how valuable something is to you until you lose it. Well, in the case of a pandemic with stringent social distancing, this has proven true for many of us. We miss our friends, we miss gathering at church, we miss engaging with people in person because we better see just how precious it is to be able to love others and be loved by them. That requires more than shared screen time.

MENTAL HEALTH
Better understand that mental health is a spectrum. Many people who thought they have spent their lives as a shining example of sterling mental health have suddenly found themselves to be overly stressed, anxious, not sleeping well, and even wrestling with bouts of depression. More people are learning from experience that mental health is actually a spectrum ranging from strong mental health, to feeling stressed, to anxiety and so on up to mental illness diagnoses. All of us will experience different points along this spectrum, but with major life stressors occurring for ALL of us, there has been a skyrocketing of mental health issues.

That anyone can experience mental health issues and mental illness. Some who have ignored or were dismissive of the reality of mental health issues and mental illness are learning that ANYONE — Christians, pastors, leaders, etc. — can and DO experience both mental health issues and mental illness because they are either experiencing it for themselves, or seeing this reality in others much more.

The value of mental health professionals. For decades, MANY church leaders spoke negatively (or were outright opposed) about someone seeing a mental health professional, and others joined in their mockery. That’s happening less today as pastors are increasingly needing to refer church and community members to skilled mental health professionals for help, and the need for clinical counseling for church leaders has also increased dramatically.

CHURCH
The utter failure of the attractional model. For decades, church leaders have worked diligently to try to have church members bring spiritually dead people to a building full of strangers to hear a message. Before the pandemic, data was already conclusive that the attractional model is a failure at making new disciples; it might bring in some people to fill chairs, but it was NEVER an effective means of evangelism. Now that buildings have been temporarily removed, we can see the utter failure of trying to reach the world with the Gospel by relying on non-Christians to come to our buildings.

Just how unequipped our congregations are. Most churches do nothing — that’s right, Z E R O — to equip their members in how to effectively proclaim the Gospel to non-Christians. In fact, a recent study revealed a majority of people who profess to be Christians don’t even know what the Great Commission is. Ephesians 4:11-12 tells us one of the key responsibilities of church leaders is to “equip God’s people to do his work and build up the church, the body of Christ.” The pandemic is revealing to us just how unequipped the saints are.

Local churches don’t need CEO’s, they need shepherds. There are many pastors and church staff wrestling with this time of pandemic because they have long adopted a business model for the church, seeing themselves more as CEOs than as shepherds. Now, in a time when their congregations greatly need shepherding, they’re having to reassess how they “do ministry.”

CONCLUSION
L. Scott Martens shared the following personal snippet in Reader’s Digest:

On a crisp Minnesota fall afternoon, my four-year-old son was helping me rake leaves in the front yard of our farmhouse. I glanced up just in time to see a flock of geese flying over and pointed out how they flew in a formation shaped like a “V”.

He patiently watched them as they disappeared over the horizon and then turning to me asked, “Do they know any other letters?”

You might think it’s a childish question to ask, that the geese won’t “learn” any other letter-shaped formation. But sometimes we can’t or shouldn’t do things the way we have always done them. Sometimes we should or must learn new lessons.

What are you learning lately?

Scotty