Convictions or Post-it Notes?

It is interesting to ponder how it is we learn. There is this emphasis lately on hands-on learning, and I think it is because we realize that a lot of what we are taught does not really stick with us. I took French in high school and German in college, but Norwegian is all I can remember - and I learned that by accident during a month's stay in Norway with a friend. To really absorb something, we seem to need to experience it. It's like the difference between reading the Cliff Notes to Farewell to Arms and truly experiencing Hemingway. The Cliff Notes can tell me he meets the nurse and falls in love, but the words of Hemingway actually put me in the room with them.

It only gets more confusing when you think about how we learn faith. In some ways, religious education is like reading the Cliff Notes on what is innately internal and personal. Sting says, "Let your soul be your pilot," and "Take me to the pilot of your soul," calls Elton John. How then could we expect something as weighty as the soul to be piloted by Cliff Notes?

The way I see it, much of what we learn about anything merely gets tacked on us like post-it notes: Jesus died for my sins. He rose again on the third day. I will love the Gators. We vote Republican. The average teenager is a walking "post-it tree." Of course, some of us feel like raging intellectuals because we've ripped off the yellow post-it to put on a pink one, and actually pride ourselves on our individuality! When I turned 18, I registered Democrat because my dad was a Republican. It took me eight more years figure out what either meant. Pink or yellow, it's still just a post-it.

We parents are proud of the training we've given our kids. When it's time to let them go, we spin them around three times, point them in the right direction and hope they read their post-it notes. But the first good wind in college blows most of them off - but not all. There are always a few notes that were unknowingly sewn in to the fiber of their soul. These post-its may have come from you, mom and dad, but not the stitches.

Sometimes you've got to lost your "post-it faith" to find the internal convictions that won't fly off in the wind. It may be oh so small - one lonely, little piece of faith sewn into your heart - but it's yours. It might be the size of a mustard seed, but you start with that because what you grow from there will be real and will stick with you.

Adolescence and young adulthood is the natural time to inventory your post-its. If you've been raised to "believe," you need to question it. It you've been raised agnostic or atheist, you need to question that. Post-it notes get very comfortable. There is some security in wearing them. They make us feel as if we know what we think. I've watched many a youth dash off to college, post-its flying off in the wind, only to see them again in ten years with all of them tacked back neatly in place. They are a lot easier to own then convictions. Convictions involve a needle and thread and sometimes pain. I think there is nothing sadder than to meet an adult clutching their post-it notes against the wind of time and change.

Integral to faith is doubt. Integral to learning is experience. Look, touch, wonder. Henry David Thoreau said, "The unexamined life is not worth living." He said that he went to the woods because he didn't want to get to the end of his life and realize he had never lived... or that the only convictions he ever owned were post-it notes?