Today's Devotional
May 14, 2008
Subject: Useless Learning
2 Timothy 3:7 "Ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth."
It seems that I get just a little more frustrated each day with our school administrators at the high school where I teach in Houston. My wife is probably really tired of hearing me say, "the more I work at this school, the less value I put into college degrees." The problem is that our administrators have bachelors, masters and even doctorate degrees. They know all of the rules of the school district and of the high school and they can recite them, but I'm not sure they know how to apply all of that knowledge. Resolving simple issues seems to be a most difficult task in our school. For instance last week we had an unexpected power outage at school. It happened right before school started and all of the students were in the cafeteria waiting for the first bell. That bell never came and the lights went out and the air conditioning went off. The conditions were perfect for an uncomfortable group of students to begin mayhem and mischief and that was happening. I continually told a principle that we needed to move the students to an area where we could exercise more control. After a couple of fights broke out, we moved the students. Many other bad things happened that day to illustrate my point, but suffice it to say, leadership was absent.
The issue is that like most people, including me, I went to college to get a degree and not necessarily to learn. Of course I got the degree, but I realized many years later, that I still had a lot of learning to do. All of the head knowledge in the world does you no good if you can't make application of the knowledge. Interject the fact that you are working with people, all whom God has uniquely made and it gets that much tougher to apply rules and laws and emotions and everything else to address the issues of life. That's why a man or woman of faith who didn't complete high school can move mountains while a person with a PhD can spend a day deciding which toothpaste to purchase.
Today you can learn much, but if that learning doesn't result in making things happen when they need to, it's useless. You don't need another degree, you need the knowledge of truth.
Carlen
