Love of the Mind

I was driving by a Junior HIgh school today and noticed that the track was packed with students.  They were slowly walking around the football field, in groups and pairings.  As I watched them lifelessly drift through the motion of walking, I was struck that the scene looked an awful lot alike another.  It looked like a scene mostly viewed in movies, the scene of the workout yard in a prison.  I could not help but laugh when this comparison hit me.  I remember always thinking that Jr. High was a prison and here was another reminder of why.  It was perfect, the track and filed were surrounded by high fencing, the students were all under close supervision, and all the trapped personal wanted to be free.  

The sad part of this story is that is how the majority of students feel about their education.  They are there because they have to be there.  If it wasn't law that they attend, they would have been staying home and doing more enjoyable activities.  And with that mentality they go into learning, or at least going through the motions of learning.  It ingrains in them as sense that learning has to be forced upon them, or it instills the attitude of requiring someone to make them learn.  What does this do to us as a people?  

When we stop learning we stop growing.  It is a simple fact.  So many people don't know how to learn, or go about trying to learn on their own.  They have always had someone to spoon feed them what was required.  I have seen this so often in areas of the faith.  People don't know how to go about learning about God, Jesus, the Bible, the world through a Christian world view of anything like that.  They don't know how to learn.     

But if we take seriously the commands of Jesus and the commands of God than this is not an option.  Jesus says in Matthew 22: 37 "... You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind."  It is the last object of the preposition phrase that we forget.  We claim to love God with all our hearts and souls, but we fail miserably with loving God with our minds.  We have been trained since little kids to be taught, so much so that we have not learned how to teach ourselves.  What would happen if a generation of Christ followers took it upon themselves to really love God with all of their minds?  I think the world would be changed.  Apologetics would be a natural move for Christians.  Church members would feel confident in sharing their faith.  Parents could explain some of the deeper things in their beliefs to their own sons and daughters.  

Do you love God with your mind?