Education At The Intersection

The word “confrontation” means, “to bump into something”. And life is a kind of continual confrontation. It is forever a meeting…an intersecting of my life with yours, or with an experience, or with some crisis. Sometimes these meetings are painful, sometimes joyful, sometimes fearful, and sometimes tragic. But always they are educational. We can learn from them.

In our school classrooms, the mind comes to grips, with an idea, with a teacher, with history, or with a fact of science. In the laboratory of life, we encounter new sensations, new smells, new facts. Even an argument is an education, and making mistakes is a learning process.

If we looked back over our life-time, we would find many points of intersection that were significant. We had a head-on collision with a new idea, or a new experience, or a new problem. Sometimes these experiences seemed like the end of the world, and yet they may also have been the prelude to something better.

Paul looked back over his life, and he said, “I have learned in whatever state I am, to be content…I know how to be abased, I know how to abound; in any and all circumstances, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and want.” And then he capped it all off by adding, “I can do anything, through him who strengthens me.” (Phil. 4:11-13)

The Christian faith has always declared, what we have been slow to accept, that our faith is a kind of head-on-collision. The apostle, while thinking he was running the other way, ran head on into Christ. And this encounter changed the entire direction of his life. He learned that you can come to grips with anything if you are going the right way and if you have the right company. He encountered fears, and they made him a stronger man. He encountered new problems and he discovered that his Christ was sufficient for all of them. He encountered beatings, imprisonment, even the threat of death, and he discovered that he had been well schooled at the intersection of faith.

Paul ended his class session to Christian followers, by writing on the black-board for all of his pupils to see: “My God will supply every need of yours, according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus.” (Phil 4:19)

Sometimes we go “bumping” through life with little reason or thought, and we complain about how tough it has been for us. But when we take the “bumps” while hanging onto the Savior, and when we have head-on collisions with hard times, but share them with a living Lord, the “agony” has a way of changing to an “ecstasy”, and life that might have gone on down to defeat, goes striding on to victory.

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