October 15th, 2021

​Life is stormy. I think we make two big mistakes when it comes to that reality.

One, we spend too much time trying to avoid storms.

And two, we don't spend enough time in the middle of and after the storms trying to understand the lessons those storms were here to teach us.

Because I write a lot - because I share a lot of what I'm thinking and feeling - people sometimes call me wise. I don't know if I am or not, but I know this - any wisdom I have - almost all of it I attribute to hardship.

But hardship doesn't just come and go and on the way out hand us a list of the lessons. Hardship doesn't leave behind homework assignments and final exams. Hardship comes and goes and on the way out leaves only an echo.

An echo that asks: what have you learned?

It's up to us. Do we ignore the echo, or do we let it echo within us until we are sure we know the answers; until we can feel the wisdom settle in?

Some days, I wonder if I might be addicted to wisdom. Because that echo rarely leaves me. I constantly hear life asking me: what have you learned?

I believe that's God. Maybe you believe it's just life. Either way, I've come to believe what Mel Robbins says: life is school.

Some people say it's the writer in me. Always wanting to find the next thing in life to write about. I think it's the student in me. I had to escape high school and college to finally embrace my chance to be a student.

I don't think I ever cared much for the idea of being graded on what I learned. The rebel in me, maybe. But I love the idea of experiencing lessons without having to memorize them.

Maybe that's why I've never been more excited about getting up and going to school every day.

There's a couple of things about the school of life. It's hard. You don't have to say I love hardship, but you do have to find a way to be grateful for it. You don't have to hug hardship when it arrives; but you need to be wise enough to give it a hug when it leaves.

And - you have to be committed to doing more than surviving the storms in life. You have to be committed to coming out on the other side believing you now somehow have a better chance of thriving BECAUSE of the storms.

Here's a big thing about that gratitude and that surviving and thriving. That rarely happens alone. That rarely happens when we weather a storm; it happens when we weather storms together.

So often we are caught up in the emotions of battling the storm. We need people in our lives who are just far enough outside our storms to assure us things are going to be OK. And people who are taking notes on the lessons while we are living them out.

Too often I think we see our shared responsibility on earth as one of helping each other survive life's storms.

I wonder if our responsibility isn't more than that. What if life really IS school - what if we are all forever students AND teachers?

What if life isn't about weathering, but weathering together?

What if we are made to hug each other when the storms arrive, and together hug the storms on the way out?

What if together we're supposed to hear that echo:

What have you learned?