Walk
Before You Fly
“He
who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and
run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying.” Friedrich
Nietzsche
There's
a little baby boy in my church who just celebrated his first
birthday. His name is Isaiah—great expectations are held for this
mighty little man. He's still a crawler because he can move so fast
on his knees, why waste the energy in learning to walk. Anyone who's
ever watched a baby learn to walk knows how difficult it is. All that
up and down, all that wobble and whump! Frustration after
frustration. But, eventually, they do it...we all do it.
Learning
something new is both a joy and a challenge at any age. I remember
trying to wrap my mouth around Old English while reading Chaucer in
tenth grade. Did you have to memorize some of that? Painful. And
learning to speak French was a whole order of business different from
learning the individual words. I remember, also, the first time I
walked into a classroom as a brand new teacher. I had absolutely no
clue what to do, or how to begin. Most of us want to jump from 'go'
to 'expert' without the sleepless nights and bloodletting required in
mastering practically anything.
Sometimes,
we give up before we become fluent simply because the work is too
hard. It's embarrassing to fail, and fail, and half-do what seems
easy for other people. Someone once said, “The bird who dares to
fall, is the bird who learns to fly.” We must take the baby-steps,
the butt-whumps, and the red-faced failure to become accomplished at
almost anything. We must walk before we fly.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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