In Theory and In Practice

I was humbled this last tuesday. I have recently been attending a marriage building small group. Its been great and is definitely making my marriage better. But on to the humbling part. Before my wife and I got married we went to this same class but only went to a couple of sessions. The session that we had last week I remembered from before. I also remember that when I had went through the last time I had a lot of theorys of how marriage should work, the situations that would come up, and how I should and would respond. I had read the scriptures and I thought I was ready and that I would make a great husband. I found myself wondering what had happened last tuesday. All the things I thought that I would do right I did wrong, the situations that I was so prepared for blind sided me. With all my book smarts about marriage I thought I was prepared but in reality I was the same as everyone else, making the same mistakes, and getting into the same stupid arguments. So what had happened. Things are different in theory than they are in practice. The same thing is true with the last two years of my life. In planting this church I have run into situations that until I had encountered them I had only read of them. Once again I had lots of theorys but I have not done these last two years gracefully. In fact they have been quite dogged and clumsy. It reminds me of combat. When I was on my way to Iraq there was a lot of talk about the situations we would encounter and how bravely or not bravely we would handel them. While I was there I saw veteran Sgt. Majors cower in fear and timid privates act bravely. Things are different in theory than in practice. There are a couple lessons one can learn from this. First is the lesson that nobody does it perfect no matter how much they know, to steal once again from the Matrix "nobody makes the first Jump" everybody screws up and every one acts less admirably than had hoped when the right situation occurs. The second and most important is you don't know as much as you think, youre not as great as you think, youre not going to do as well as you think. Everybody can use more practice. Thats why God sends us through so much stuff and through such long seasons. We all need lots of pratice. So here's to lots of practice. Live the adventure.