CHAPTER 1
Lesson 1
Life's a Classroom
Life truly began for me at age twenty-seven. That is when I had the nervous breakdown that changed my life forever. At that time, I was struggling with depression, addictions, self-hate, and a world of emotional problems. And on February 20, 2002, a.k.a. "nervous breakdown day," everything reached fever pitch. That turned out to be both the worst and best day of my life. Finding myself in a terribly desperate and hopeless place, I did the only thing that made sense: I prayed for death.
In that moment, I could not fathom taking another step toward my life. The thought of getting up the next day, going to work, and doing it all over again seemed impossible from that vantage point. As I lay on my living room floor in the fetal position, I was suddenly reminded of something I had heard the pastor say the week before at church: "When you feel you need help, call out to Jesus, and He will help you." Having no other recourse, that is exactly what I did.
Much to my surprise, like a knight in shining armor, He actually showed up. I could feel His presence in my living room as His supernatural peace filled the place. Though I did not understand what was happening at the time, I knew it was real. Lying there, unable to move, I was suddenly struck by the realization that everything was going to be all right. Indeed, it was a much-welcomed change from the hopelessness of the prior moment. Somehow I also knew that nothing was ever going to be the same again. And, by golly, it wasn't.
That was the day I embarked on a healing journey that would leave no stone unturned. Though volumes could be written about the journey itself, it is beyond the scope of this book. Instead, I will be sharing with the reader the most powerful lessons I have learned under the tutelage of life. The title of the book itself actually conveys the first and most pivotal lesson about life — it is a classroom, and we are here to learn.
A classroom is only as great as its teacher. The classroom of life also has a great teacher. His name is God. God is the focal point of life, and every lesson points right back to Him. The following verse from the Amplified Bible beautifully accentuates this point:
She will bear a Son, and you shall call His name Jesus [the Greek form of the Hebrew Joshua, which means Savior], for He will save His people from their sins [that is, prevent them from failing and missing the true end and scope of life, which is God]. (Matthew 1:21 AMP)
God is the true end and scope of life. Our main purpose is to live in and share intimacy with Him. This truth has been reflected back to me in each and every life lesson. For me, life is God, and God is life. The two cannot be separated. They are one and the same. He gave me life, sustains my life, and gives my life purpose. Thus, I have learned that anything gleaned apart from Him is deception.
The fact is that we are here to learn, and God is eager to teach us. To that, one might ask, "What exactly are we here to learn?" The answer is, anything and everything. There is so much to learn. Every circumstance and event in our life offers deep lessons concerning life itself, God, the world, relationships, even ourselves. And every day provides new opportunities and a new lesson plan, whether we participate in it or not.
While life can certainly be challenging at times, I have learned the fundamental truth that it is for me and not against me. To live is to continuously grow in God. It is a journey, not a destination. If we did not learn, we would not grow. We would remain stunted in our spiritual and emotional maturity. Growing and learning makes life easier as we go along. Indeed, we are meant to be emotionally and spiritually evolving at all times. To evolve means: "To change or develop slowly, often into a better more complex, or more advanced state: to develop by a process of evolution" (Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary, n.d.).
I find an interesting contrast between physical evolution and emotional and spiritual evolution. It is not by choice that our bodily functions are in constant flux, i.e. our body is aging, our organs are performing their respective functions, and our cells are continuously dying and reproducing. These are processes of the human body that happen automatically and organically. While physical evolution takes place automatically, it is not so with its emotional and spiritual counterparts. Nay, emotional and spiritual evolution and growth occur by choice.
I am reminded of a sad, yet profound, moment in my life when someone I knew passed away. As I stared at his lifeless body in the coffin, I had the realization that though he lived a relatively long life, he failed to learn from life what is truly important. I found myself doing what I hope no one ever does at my funeral — praying to God that I would never be like him. Although he had amassed substantial financial wealth and was acquainted with prominent members of society, his family relationships were in disarray. He allowed money to get in the way of love. His legacy of anger and division is still alive and well in those he left behind. In my estimation, he lived and died and never got a clue. As a result, he robbed himself of life's true riches.
I don't know about you, but I want to leave a legacy for my children, grandchildren, and future generations of love, destiny, and a life lived with purpose. And today is the day that we can make that happen. But we can only do so by choosing to be good students of life.
The classroom setting is made up of all sorts of students: good ones, mediocre ones, bad ones, and everything in between. There are students who love to learn. They feel enriched by the acquisition and application of new information. To this type of student, learning's ups and downs and mistakes and failures challenge them to grow and meet the obstacles ahead with gusto. On the other hand, there are other students for whom learning and school are drudgeries. They dislike being challenged by new information. Learning's ups and downs and mistakes and failures are seen as stressful and unpleasant.
Academically speaking, I was never a good student. I did not have good study habits growing up, and school was primarily a means of social interaction and tomfoolery. I always managed to get average grades, but learning was definitely not my priority. What's more, years of struggling and procrastinating caused me to develop some negative attitudes about learning. This caused me to struggle all the more in college. Thus, my legacy of mediocrity lived on. After getting my Associate in Arts degree, I dropped out and vowed to stay as far away as possible from higher education. I told myself it was not for me and passively accepted my fate.
Then, years later, there was a glimmer of hope, a pivotal life-changing moment when I dared to dream that my life could be different. In January of 2002, I went back to school to study psychology, and for the first time, things were different. This time, I was there because I wanted to be. In addition, there was a real personal investment inasmuch as I was paying my own tuition. I was thoroughly interested in what I was learning. I was excited about my classes. And something funny happened: I got straight A's.
As my attitude and self-confidence level changed, I was amazed to discover some hidden qualities I did not know I possessed: intelligence and determination. They were there all along but had been hidden for years beneath negative perceptions about myself, as well as the learning process. When those perceptions started to change, so did my performance.
The classroom of life is very similar. Our attitude about learning will determine what we learn and how far we go. If we want to learn what life — and by extension, God — has to teach us, then it will behoove us to become good students. Being a good student of life begins with making the conscious decision to learn. Without that, many lessons will slip right by us. A good attitude about learning is also important to avoid the risk of developing mindsets that stunt our growth and sabotage our happiness.
Conversely, negativity is toxic to life. When we hold negative attitudes toward life, we fail to learn what it is trying to teach us and subsequently create negative outcomes. We become our own worst enemy. It is also important to note that being a good student, academically speaking, does not necessarily make a good student of life. Indeed, intellectual people often run the risk of trying to figure everything out with their heads, whereas most of life's lessons require a combination of our heads and our hearts.
In addition, the good student will quickly realize that life is full of choices. And God loves us enough to allow us to make those choices. Free will is the result of the freedom found in God's unconditional love. Moreover, free will choices, made day by day, create our destinies. Indeed, life is always trying to teach us the value and power of our choices. It is in these lessons that we learn to be successful and fulfill our dreams and goals. On the other hand, it is in our refusal to cooperate with life that we struggle needlessly and experience dysfunction.
Like the not-so-good student, we too can have negativistic attitudes that hinder learning and growth. Some of these include, but are not limited to, having a victim mentality, self-pity, entitlement, laziness, and apathy. The attitude behind these mindsets is often bitterness or resentment toward life. Therefore, people with these mindsets tend to view the experiences common to life as negative and unfair. Though they may not realize it, this becomes a vicious cycle in that it creates more negative attitudes, which in turn create even more negative outcomes.
Truly, life is a mixed bag of a myriad of experiences: joy and pain, blessings and loss, happiness and sadness, disappointment and excitement, and so on. Sometimes Christians get the wrong idea about what it means to be a follower of Jesus. They develop a belief that being a Christian means an absence of problems. But Jesus did not offer us an absence of problems; He offered us assurance of victory over anything that life may bring.
I have told you these things, so that in Me you may have [perfect] peace. In the world you have tribulation and distress and suffering, but be courageous [be confident, be undaunted, be filled with joy]; I have overcome the world. [My conquest is accomplished, My victory abiding]. (John 16:33 AMP)
I believe that an absence of problems would not be beneficial for us, as it would stunt our spiritual and emotional growth. We learn through both positive and negative experiences. It is unhealthy to live with the expectation that everything is always going to go our way because that is just not reality.
Indeed, I have met people who have all but scripted their lives out like playwrights. They have fixed concepts of what their lives should look like, and they get frustrated when things do not fit the script. Interestingly enough, most of the people I have met who are happy and fulfilled will say that life did not turn out at all as they had envisioned. But because they were flexible and open to the changes and lessons wrought into every day, it turned out better than they could have imagined.
This has definitely been my experience. I too had a script for my life. However, looking back, I realize that the plans I had in my mind were quite superficial. They certainly did not incorporate the twists and turns of life and the role my own spiritual evolution would play in it. Today I feel that plan would have left me feeling extremely empty. Truly, I have found God's plan, although vastly different than what I expected, to be richer and more fulfilling than I could have dreamed possible.
One day, while praying and meditating, I had an experience with God that brought this point home in a very real way. In my quiet time, I felt led by the Holy Spirit to visualize the canvas of my life, i.e. the life I had created for myself thus far. He revealed to me that in many ways, I was resisting His plan — not because I did not want His plan, per se, but because I had my own ideas about what my life should look like. Then, driving the point home further still, He told me to envision myself taking white paint and a paintbrush and painting over the canvas until it was completely blank. Next He said, "Now put down the paintbrush. I'll take it from here."
Learning of God's unending love for me has enabled me to believe, with every fiber of my being, that He has a good plan for my life. I also learned that my plan apart from Him did not work out — though not for lack of trying. So when He asked me to put down the brush and allow Him to do the painting, I was more than happy to do so. Seeing God's plan unfold through my cooperation has enabled me to have a good attitude toward life and learning. From this perspective, any problem I may have is automatically framed through the light of His love and goodness. Through it all, I have put one foot in front of the other in trust, knowing that He works it all out for my good. And something crazy keeps happening — one way or the other, it always does.
Charles Swindoll said that life is 10 percent what happens to us and 90 percent how we react to what happens to us. What if we started responding to every circumstance, whether negative or positive, from the perspective of, "What can I learn from this?" When we learn to ask ourselves what life might be trying to teach us through each experience, we will find that our attitudes toward negative circumstances will change for the better.
Moreover, when we realize that life is not against us but for us, we naturally take on a more hopeful and positive attitude. Positive attitudes, in turn, create positive outcomes in our lives. Therefore, by taking this approach toward life, we will become our own best friends and greatest allies in creating destiny.
Additionally, those powerful attitudes and mindsets will open doors to success and breakthroughs. Our heart will open even more to learning, and as a result, we will learn all the more. The more we learn, the more we grow and evolve. As we strengthen our spiritual muscles, we learn to get out of our own way, and life becomes easier to manage. Over time, we find true happiness. We are no longer dreading negative experiences as we find they are fewer and further between. When we do have problems, past learning and positive attitudes allow us to confront things head on, thereby allowing us to move from problem to solution in no time.
At the end of the day, we are the common denominator. It is our attitudes, mindsets, and belief systems that determine the choices we will make in life. Furthermore, it is our choices that determine our outcomes. Things that seem unfair happen to us all. Thus, a powerful principle I have learned is that of personal accountability. Indeed, we all have problems at times, but add to those problems a bad attitude and poor choices, and now we really have problems.
As for anyone with a "woe is me" attitude toward life, my advice it to lose it fast. It serves absolutely no productive purpose but only creates worse problems and impairs our ability to learn from life. An inability to learn will not only keep us stuck in our problems, but it will wreak an endless cycle of chaos and dysfunction in our lives.
Along that same vein, here is another funny little fact in regard to learning from life: To learn is a choice, but if we refuse to learn, we will always get reruns. Life will attempt to teach us, whether we want to learn or not. And if we fail to learn the lesson, it will attempt to teach it to us again, and again, and again.
Rerun is a term used for television programs that are airing again after the original air date. We are on a pass/fail system with life. In other words, when we pass, we move on to bigger and better lessons. The opposite is also true. When we refuse to learn, we continue to get reruns of our past problems. As a result, life gets harder and harder. Every time we let a lesson slip by, we lose the opportunity to learn powerful coping and life skills necessary for living well. Our emotional and spiritual growth becomes stunted, and, by consequence of that, we end up having undue emotional pain. I am thankful that I got the memo about reruns early on and heeded it. Here is what it said: Learn lessons, have less pain; fail to learn lessons, have more pain. I opted for the former. I hope you will too.
The bottom line of this entire chapter is this: whether we choose to learn or not, life's a classroom. Therefore, make life easier on yourself and choose to be one of God's best students. Like any good parent, God is most concerned about our growth and development. It pleases Him greatly when we have a student's attitude toward life because He knows that will allow us to experience His best. The more we learn, the more we manifest what we were created to be and reflect His nature and glory. Today, choose to be a good student. Learn the lessons your life is teaching you. Have a good attitude toward life experiences and, most important, enjoy the learning.
