Problems (mathematical and other)

I <3 words. I mean it. I can throw down a rap, spin out a story, or whip together a sonnet all without much effort. I read about 300 pages/day. I've been known to read cereal boxes at breakfast. So when images of a math book interrupted a pleasant daydream, I felt an immediate compulsion to grab some holy water and a crucifix. Begone, Devil!

Just kidding. Mostly. I really didn't hate math until we got to calculus, but I was frustrated that math never came as easily to my understanding as did pretty much everything else. My teachers would usually assign the even-numbered problems (you know, the ones that didn't have the answers in the back of the book?) so I'd have to go through and do the odd ones first, just to see if I understood. I suppose that I've just revealed myself as an overachiever. Well, I am, but really, it was the right thing to do. I had to figure out what I was doing, or I'd go through and mess up every mathematical convention known to man. For each night's homework, here's how it went. I'd do number one, check the answer, fix my work. I'd do number three, check the answer, fix my work. By then, I usually understood what I had to do, so I'd go on to numbers two and four.

As I continued thinking about that process, God showed me that that's kind of how it works with us as believers. The Bible is meant to be a tool to shape you into the you that God wants! In the Bible, you read about Jesus and various believers like Paul, Peter, John, David, Moses... you learn what to do and what not to do. The goal isn't to be Jesus, Paul etc. You can't do that, and God doesn't want you to. The goal is to learn how to live for God and then to do it yourself. Like with math, you can't just do the exact same thing for each question. Let's say the answer to number one was 32. You can't just write '32' down as the answer to number two! You have to learn the process, how you get the answer, and then take that process and apply it to the next question. Your life will not look exactly like others'. That's not the point. You should be going through the same process, but the results will often be very different.