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“Childlike Wonder”

We think of spiritual and intellectual pursuits as mutually exclusive endeavors, but they are one and the same. Great love is born of great knowledge. In fact, your knowledge is your worship ceiling!

Knowledge does not automatically translate into worship. But in some respects, quality of worship is determined by quantity of knowledge. The more you know, the more you have to worship. So that’s why the second virtue of manhood is a childlike wonder about the world.

I’m not advocating an intellectual feeding frenzy. After all, we already suffer from information overload. There is more information in one Sunday edition of the New York Times than the average person living in the Middle Ages would have consumed in an entire lifetime. I’m not convinced we need to know more, as much as we need to do more with what we know. That said, keep learning!

“Live as if you’ll die tomorrow,” said Mahatma Gandhi. “Learn as if you’ll live forever.” That’s a good rule of thumb.

According to the Pew Research Institute, half of adults read fewer than five books per year. And men read thirteen percent fewer books than women. I don’t know if you’re above average or below average, but five books a year doesn’t cut it. Especially since most men, myself included, average twenty hours of ESPN per week.

The most important law of ecology is this: L ≥ C. For an organism to survive, the rate of learning must be equal to or greater than the rate of change happening around them. With the rate of change escalating, we must learn faster, learn better, and learn more.

The word disciple comes from the Greek word mathétés. The root word means “the mental effort needed to think something through.” So by definition, a disciple is someone who never stops learning.

Faith is not mindless.

Faith is mindful.

Let’s be men who are driven by a childlike wonder to know as much as we can about as much as we can. Why? So we can worship God as much as we can.

What are you going to read today?