I never cease being amazed at our God-given capacity to learn. Which reminds me of my favorite Gary Larson cartoon…

The humor there is in the irony that our brains never really “fill up.” No matter how much we take in, there’s always room for more…though it hardly feels like it when your Greek instructor throws a page of paradigms at you and tells you to know them for the quiz next Tuesday.

Scientists tell us that every experience we’ve ever had is still there in our brains somewhere. With the exception of illness or brain damage, we never really forget anything. We just don’t have a synaptical connection to everything we ever learned. But its all there.

Even though I know all that, I still experience an irrational fear every time I’m presented with a huge amount of information. It becomes very easy to believe that there is some kind of brain meter, and when it reaches “F” you’re done. No more input.

Our brains are not like the computer hard drive on which these words I write will sit until you, dear reader, come to awaken them. This past week I found out that I couldn’t defragment my laptop’s hard drive because I had less than 15% free space left. This meant the agonizing decision over which video and music files would have to go to make room. But even though it feels like it, I don’t have to do that when more information is presented to my brain.

I had a hard time convincing myself of that this week, though, as I trained on the cash register at the campus bookstore where I now work. For each different type of transaction I was shown dozens of mouse clicks and multiple key strokes. It began to feel overwhelming. That old fear welled up inside that there was no way I was ever going to get this down. Even as I nodded my head and tried to look confident as my coworker patiently walked me through the steps, a nightmare was already forming in my imagination. A long line of customers snakes through the store, all waiting to check out. I’m the only clerk in the store. The first guy gives me his credit card and suddenly all goes blank. How do I input a credit card? I feel beads of sweat weaving their way through my eyebrows. In a panic, I click at random on one of the myriad icons with their meaningless little pictures…and I’ve double-charged his card. The customer starts to yell and….

…and I snap out of my nightmare with the remembrance of two little words that once were the source of a terror that makes my present fear look childish. Those two words? Winter Hebrew. And now I can smile when I say those words. I’m on the other side of that Red Sea, and I not only survived, but I actually know some things about Hebrew weak verbs, a feat that seemed well beyond mortals just one month ago.

So I will learn the cash register, and all the many other procedures that come with a new job. It’ll be OK.

……….

Like a lot of people, I used to dread the thought of going to heaven. Then I read a piece by Jonathan Edwards that assured me that there is a reason God gave me a never-ending capacity to learn and awe and wonder. He said that we will never, for all eternity, stop finding new things to learn about God, new ways to know him. So that computer cash register means something holy to me now, because it’s telling me that the challenges and wonder will never go away. Only the nightmares will cease.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 10th, 2005 at 10:58 pm and is filed under It`s All About Me. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.