My morning meditations today drew me to words from Fred Buechner, one of the eloquent pastor-authors of our time. He writes about a pivotal moment in his spiritual journey, when his mind became fixed on a single learning objective: "I wanted to learn about Christ," Buechner writes:

"about the Old Testament, which had been his Bible, and the New Testament, which was the Bible about him; about the history of the church, which had been founded on the faith that through him God had not only revealed his innermost nature and his purpose for the world, but had released into the world a fierce power to draw people into that nature and adapt them to that purpose, the church that not even the assorted barbarities and blunders of its ragged two thousand years had ever quite managed finally to discredit or destry; about the theological systems that the passion of his original followers, and of Saint Paul in particular, had been distilled into."

That's a lot to learn about. Millions of books written on the topics. But learning about Christ, for Beuchner, was more than book learning. He continues:

"No intellectual pursuit had ever aroused in me such intense curiosity, and much more than my intellect was involved, much more than my curiosity aroused. ...I had been moved [by Christ] to astonished tears which came from so deep inside me that to this day I have never fathomed them. I wanted to learn more about the source of those tears and the object of that astonishment. I wanted to know, and be known by, people who knew greatly more about Christ than I did, and were greatly closer to him than I was, greatly more aware of what they were about and of what he was about in them. Maybe above everything, I wanted to do something for him...."

For your faith to be alive, you need to be actively learning about that which stirs your heart to tears.

Learning about Christ needs to be one of our core objectives. I ask you:

Are you actively engaged in learning about Christ now? How? Are you hungry to learn more about Christ but don't know where to turn or what to do to satisfy that hunger?

What energies or curiosities—or astonishments—are pushing inside you right now toward learning?

Drop me a note with your answers to these questions. Many thanks, and bless you in your learning!