Have you ever known someone who was expertly skilled at something? Maybe they could play an instrument beautifully, fix a car easily, build things well, or solve a puzzle quickly. We look at what they can do and think, “I could never do something like that.” The trouble is that we are seeing those skilled people at the end of a journey that started in the same place we are right now.
No one sees a guitar for the first time and immediately starts shredding. It takes time, and patience, and practice. You need to be willing to overcome the struggle with being a blank slate as you learn the basics. When you get those down, you stretch yourself a little more to learn something new. And this is the great thing, there is rarely a ceiling on how much you can learn about something as long as you just keep practicing.
This is why doctors “practice” medicine or lawyers “practice” the law. In medicine bloodletting used to be cutting edge technology, “You have a cold? It’s probably because you have too much dang blood in you!” In New Jersey it is illegal to slurp soup in public, so let’s go to court. Neither of these things are top of mind for either of these groups because the fields are always growing to use the best knowledge we have.
This is how our faith should be, ever-growing. We all start at the basics; God loved me so much that He sent his only Son to die on the cross for my sins. With this knowledge we are supposed to share that love with the people around us. We can learn more about the history of our faith. We can find new ways to apply our faith. The first readers of the scriptures probably never thought about people studying them over the internet or listening to someone read it anytime anywhere. But here we are reiterating and remixing the old and the new in wonderful and interesting ways.
We just need to keep practicing, using the scripture we learn to grow in our faith. James in 1:22-24 writes “22 But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves.23 For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, they are like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror. 24 For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like.”
We have a limitless potential to grow in our faith. We just need to put in a little bit of practice. We don’t need to look at other people and think, “I wish I could be like them.” We just need to decide to start.