Recently Deborah Pampillon from Uruguay finished the 40 days of the DNA of Discipleship (in Spanish) and has started the second series and made an excellent observation:
“We when start something new, we don’t know where to begin. An example is with my daughter, Belen (8 years old) who asks me every morning which verses she should read in the Bible and I tell her, “read wherever you want” but she answers that she doesn’t know where to read.
This has made me think about the learning process that we often don’t know where to start and it is like learning to ride a bike that we need someone to tell us when to start pedaling, how to keep balance and little by little we start trusting our coach, the bike and ourselves. Discipleship is the same where we need someone to tell us what to do and how to do it and who can join with us, cheering us on as we learn to trust the experience until we can do it on our own and then repeat the process with others.”
I really like the example she uses with her daughter. Of course she would never just point at the bike and tell her she should just learn to ride it. Deborah sees the need to do the same with Belen’s Bible reading as well.
We really underestimate the difference that ‘being with’ the other person in the learning process will make. We think it is someone else’s job.
We make an intentional decision to start running down the street at the side of a new bike rider and we need to make an intentional decision to help someone else read the Scriptures. The process is really quite similar.
Try the 40 Days in English or Spanish. You might recommend it to a mission trip organizer as a good preparation tool and one you can share in the field. Or use it for pre-training for camp counsellors. Or do it because you or someone else could benefit from it Make an intentional decision to learn to read the Scriptures yourself and to run alongside someone else.
Blessings in your labouring,
Jim