Tuesday, December 9, 2008

A Greener Map

A friend once told me about a computer game where you have a map, and all the areas where you haven't gone yet are dark, and the areas where you have gone are green. The areas that are dark become green as you explore more areas. She likened this to visiting new places in real life, explaining that it was as if she was filling in more green areas in her mental map. I like this analogy a lot because I can relate to it really well. It creates such a perfect visual image in my mind, not only for the exploring of new physical places, but also for the exploring of new intellectual and spiritual places.

It is amazing to me how much there is to learn. Sometimes I will think, that's it, there's nothing more to learn, but that is because my mind hasn't expanded yet to accommodate more knowledge or understanding. As I get older, I understand things better and I see things completely differently from how I saw them before and I wonder why I didn't understand or notice them before. It's an exciting thing to think that there is so much to learn and to feel that I am becoming more capable of learning it.

It has been exciting in my New Testament class this semester to be learning so much about Christ and to be gaining a better understanding of his life. It's exciting to still be learning more about him, even after having grown up learning about him. It's exciting to read the gospels of the New Testament after having read them before and to be able to find new meanings or ways of understanding them. And then to think that in spite of how much there is to learn from what we have, there is so much more that we don't have and that what we do have is so little in comparison to what we don't have.

As the last verse in John reads: "And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written."

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