Knowing For Yourself

When do you know something well enough that you truly know it for yourself? This is something that I have thought about a lot over the past couple of years. I had always been taught as if my mind was empty and simply needed to be filled with knowledge, and people kept trying to stuff more and more information into my head. Yet my instinct was to try to make sense of the things I was taught, to take a lot of time for thinking and seeing how new information fit (or didn't fit) with what I had been taught before, to pray and to find out from God what I should believe. I tried really hard to learn from my own experiences, to try to do things that I was learning about. But it was really hard to know how to follow my instincts when even people who believed that they were helping me learn by my own experiences kept giving more and more information, more and more instructions. I was never given long enough to learn one thing really well before it was time to move on to something else. This was especially frustrating at church, because of the great importance of coming to understand spiritual things.

I eventually reached a few conclusions:

1. I don't know something for myself yet if I have to refer to what somebody else said about it in order to remember or to be able to explain it to someone.

2. It's okay to start with where I am right now and move forward, step by step, from there.

3. I needed to slow down to my speed of learning, even if that meant that it was impossible for me to do things that I had always been taught were necessary for learning.

4. God truly can teach us much more than we think He can, so long as we are living as He wants us to, if we take the time and do the work necessary to learn how He sees teaching and learning. We really should trust Him more to mean what He tells us in the scriptures, even if it goes against what our own culture tells us, and even if it is a hard and long process to come to understand what He actually means.

Things have changed dramatically in my life because I decided to move forward, following these conclusions. I have learned a lot because of it. I am learning a lot more deeply now. I am more at peace about things that I don't understand yet because I am able to accept not understanding as simply being part of the learning process. I have learned many skills that I had been told were impossible because of my disability, so that it is a little more reasonable to live with my limitations. I have found many spiritual answers that I had been told would be impossible to find, to help me make sense of and start to heal from my trauma. I understand my relationship with God better.

I am just beginning to learn how to learn deeply and how to come to know things for myself. And it is a journey that I will definitely continue, because experimenting like this has really, really changed my life, so I know that I am making progress.