Back when I studied Hebrew in a classroom, I felt like I had returned to kindergarten. Not only was I back to learning to read and spell, but someone had to correct my spoken grammar and vocabulary — if I even managed to open my mouth.
I noticed something about my classmates, though. In one of life’s many paradoxes, whoever actually dived headfirst into the messy business of speech — whichever ones had the most joyful unconcern for correctness — were the ones who most speedily improved in their new language.
Now after a long break, I’m studying Hebrew with real live people again. And guess what? They’re onto me. With refreshing frankness, I am admonished to take risks, already. To sit down next to somebody, anybody (even an elderly lady on the bus), open my mouth and say, “Hi. I want to improve my Hebrew. Will you talk with me?”
It’s that same cheery, smeary, vibrant, fingerpainting approach to words that gets me out of writer’s block and splats and splashes those hardest-won first lines on the page. Sure, there will be revising later. And I will have to master at least some grammar before I’m done learning Hebrew. Because detail is a vital part of effective communication.
But baby steps come first.
If you have ever tried to learn to dance; if you have ever tried to recall the notes of a long-ago memorized piano piece, now accessible only in the muscle memory at your fingertips, you will know that thinking too hard can sometimes trip you up.
We need not ignore or belittle the ever-analytical mind, but simply set it aside for a moment, as the wrong tool for the task — and tune in, somehow, with that mysterious, elusive capacity for relationship which different cultures pinpoint to different locations — but which we call the heart.
Perhaps this concept is akin to the childlike heart Jesus was looking for when He told us we had to change, to turn around, to be transformed, in order to comprehend His agenda, something even more wildly outside our natural thought patterns than a brand new language.
Adults are concerned with status. Who is the greatest? they ask. They’re concerned with success. Did I do it right?
A child is concerned with relationships. Who loves me? he asks. He is quick to discern and gravitate towards genuine love, throwing himself into the messy, joyous business of relationship with carefree, unselfconscious abandon. That’s the childlike humility that sets us free…
Free to embark on the adventure of knowing Him!
Elisabeth Adams 