Familiarity with some people and some things may indeed “breed contempt,” as the old adage goes. Sometimes, however, it breeds appreciation. In fact, it’s downright amazing what I’ve learned to enjoy when I’ve simply taken the time to educate myself a little.
Take curling, for example. No, not hairstyling. Curling, the winter Olympic sport. What a bizarre and baffling game curling always seemed to me – like shuffleboard meets the Ice Capades. One guy shoves a painfully slow-moving stone across the ice while his teammates trot alongside it, frantically sweeping the ice with brooms.
“What is up with that?” I wondered.
Most of the time, I couldn’t even figure out what constituted a good or bad shot. Points went on the scoreboard and I’d think, “Wait – what did I miss here? How’d they score?”
I was used to more obvious sports – the ball goes into the basket, you get points; you count how many strokes it takes to get the golf ball in the hole and that’s your score; the ball goes over the goal line, you score a touchdown. Those make sense to me; curling, however, did not.
When the Winter Olympics were on T.V. a few months ago, I got curious enough about curling to check it out on the internet. (I “Googled” it, as we say in Nerdland.) I couldn’t quite grasp it all, but I learned enough basics about the game so that when it was being shown, I had a new appreciation for curling (which is, by the way, the second most popular sport in Canada, proving only that a true passion for curling may require frozen brain cells).
I will never be a diehard curling fan. Personally, I’m grateful to live in the South where we don’t have to take our kids to pee-wee curling practices and watch them learn to shove stones and sweep ice. But digging in and learning more about the sport did exponentially increase my appreciation for it.
It makes me wonder what else I could develop an appreciation for if I simply took the time to learn a little more. Ignorance may be the only thing standing between me and a great new interest … or even a great new way of life.
Faith used to be like that for me. I used to look in from the fringes of Christianity and assume it was for religious whackos or geeks who didn’t have anything better to do. I thought my coerced, disinterested attendance at church and Sunday school as a kid qualified me to pronounce as a teenager, “I tried religion and it didn’t work for me.”
I had, indeed, “tried religion.” What I hadn’t tried was a real relationship with God, which is the heartbeat and purpose of biblical Christianity. When I embraced that radical concept as a 19-year-old, the perpetual, tormenting “itch” in my heart and soul was finally scratched.
Might there be things you’ve been resisting because you don’t really understand them, so you’ve stuffed them into your “boring, weird, and/or intimidating file”? Sports, classical music, gardening, gourmet cooking … God?
Set your mind to persistently pursue the truth about God; set your heart to embrace what you discover. God isn’t afraid of your questions; in fact, He invites them. He knows an honest quest for truth will place you on a path that leads straight to His heart.
“You will seek Me and find Me when you seek Me with all your heart.” — Jeremiah 29:13