Geez. When will I ever learn?

When I was a child, the thought of ‘learning a lesson’ was always a painful one. If someone said to me, ‘That will teach you a lesson’, or ‘I hope you learned your lesson’, there was a harshness to it that was similar to rubbing salt in a wound. Like it was not enough that you had a wound, but now you had to rub salt in it, just to make sure you learned your lesson. Unpleasant. So as you can imagine, lessons and learning are two of my least favourite words.

But both must happen – over and over again – if the elusive duo of growth and maturity are to be achieved. Unfortunate. As soon as I realised that quite a number of lessons would have to be learned before I could become a bona fide grown up, I tried to take all my courses in the shortest period possible. Kind of like swallowing a handful of bitter pills all at once because they’ll make you feel better. I threw myself head first into one long, mistake making decade and thought that the brunt of it was over. It was in that naïve belief that I had to take the ‘let go and let God’ class for the umpteenth time. I’d gotten completely engrossed in a possibility. It had presented itself quite unexpectedly, and for some reason, that was confirmation that it was meant to be.

Y’all know what it’s like when anything in life is presented in the ‘meant-to-be’ package. There’s complete buy-in because you believe that nothing in the physical realm could possibly come in the way.

You surmount every mountain that life plants in your path because the thing you’re after is yours. Until you realise that not everything that you think is meant to be, is meant to be.</p></div><div><p>A lot of life is beyond our control for one reason or another. And in the absence of control, there is only surrender

I didn’t see this latest bout of lesson learning coming. It kind of snuck up on me and then exploded like a police water canon during a peaceful protest.

I was racing full speed ahead, not realising that I was just about to crash into a stone wall. At the very last minute, I slammed on the breaks and came to a very abrupt halt, going from 100kph to 0 in 60 seconds.

It is always a humbling experience when life stops you dead in your tracks and reminds you that you’re not the Queen of the Universe. On the bright side, it is always a good thing to cast your burdens and be worried for nothing. At the end of the day, nothing feels better than letting God do his God thing.

If we let go more often, they’d be fewer lessons to learn. And I have to say Amen to that.