Actually, it seems I’m always on a learning curve; it just changes in intensity from time to time. I’ve come to accept it as the norm. I recently had a conversation with a young writer in her twenties who at the time was writing children’s books.
“I’ve thought about writing screenplays,” she said. “But, it would mean I’d have to learn something new.”
With my mind spinning from a screenwriting book I’d just finished which was full of new information I was trying to process , I tried to tell her as kindly as I could that it’d be better if she accepted “learning something new” as a given. I refrained from explaining to her that I started out on a typewriter. I thought it might be too “…when I was a child I walked five miles in the snow to school…”
Having a brush with cancer gave me more of a “Why not try it?” attitude. I had felt God calling me to write in such an intense way. It seemed God was speaking to me through new opportunities that’d never been on my radar screen, and I took the next step. Yes, it was quite possible that I might fail, but I just had to go where God was leading which often meant learning a new skill. Well, which almost always has meant learning a new skill.
Being a finalist in the Gideon and Kairos competitions all came of learning something new, and being willing to follow what I believed to be God’s purpose for my life.
So here’s to throwing out the phrases “I don’t know how, I’ll have to learn something new, and I’m too old” and here’s to “straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.” Philippians 3:14
…now where is that instruction book?