Nothing

In all of my years of study, I never learned a single thing. I’m really not sure when my father began asking me this question, but for all of the years that he did, the answer was always the same. Day after day, I would come home from school and as we sat down for dinner around the kitchen table he would ask me, “Tell me son, what did you learn today?”
I really don’t know what he was expecting. Now that I’m a father, I prefer to believe that he had high expectations for me. I hope that he had wished to see in me some great career aspirations and a ravenous hunger for knowledge. As I continued in my academic studies, he may have hoped that some discipline would have caught the enthusiasm of my heart.
You hear about people like that don’t you? You read about those kinds of people in books; some true and some in a land of make believe. The true stories of people such as these are about men and women of renown who went on to do great and honourable things for mankind. We hear of doctors, scientists and humanitarians who have this thirst for the manner of knowledge that might produce some betterment for the human race.
I was never cursed with such a disease. Neither was I the type of child who resented my education. I went happily enough and I came home just as pleased. Each day, I would walk out of the door of that old grey tar papered farm house with my lunch pail, step on board of that long yellow educational limousine, en route to whatever school was harbouring me for that specific grade. Likewise, I would return home from that same school, step on to that bus and endure the aggravation from my peers until I safely arrived home.
“Nothing.”
Day after day, that is exactly what I learned. You really don’t expect your child to learn much during the first week of school, let alone the first day. So I doubt that during the first few days of each school year that he would have been particularly surprised by my answer. You have to have some empathy for my father don’t you? For his part, he would work and slave, day after day, tending the dusty fields, driving truck for long hours at a time, working, saving, scratching a living just to give his son a decent education with the hopes that he could have a better life. Yet day after day, year after year, his son kept coming home with the same disparaging news;
“Dad, I haven’t learned a thing.”
I would think that it would have been bearable, had my studies halted themselves in public education. After all, in a way, public school is free right? Well, it’s not free. It is quite expensive really, but it has the texture and taste of being free. It’s not like we write out a check or withdraw the cash, place it in an envelope and hand it to the principal. For some reason however, in light of the fact that I hadn’t learned one iota of knowledge in the first 19 years of my life, my dad continued to drive his truck and work his fields in order to finance my university education.
“Maybe this time; Maybe now that it’s paid for, the boy will actually learn something.” In part, he was right. It was different this time. Instead of coming home at the end of each day with the same discouraging news, I came home at the end of each week. That was the difference. The news itself happened to be exactly the same. “Nothing.” I still learned nothing.
Now I am blessed to have children of my own, who go to school day after day and learn exactly the same things that I learned when I was a boy. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. My grade 6 daughter, who on paper is learning at a grade 11 level, doesn’t learn anything either. She is exactly like her dad.
I hadn’t been lying to my father, yet, I had been learning. Had I not? There was a peculiar mystery at work between my father’s question and my response. From my end, it was as if the information was already there. It really wasn’t new. Throughout my years of study, hour by hour, day by day and week by week, it was as if I was gradually given access to the knowledge that lay latent within my own conscience.
That may very well sound like crazy talk, but I would argue that this is exactly the case with spiritual matters. There is an abundance of truth lying in the recesses of the human conscience if we have the courage to go there as well as the honesty to recognize it for what it is.


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If you want to know where I'm headed, here are some passages you can look a for your own study. If you prefer to be spoon fed and want to wait and soak up every word that I have to offer, that would be fine as well.


Ecclesiastes 3:11
Romans 2:14-15
John 16:8
Psalm 19:1
Psalm 50:6
Romans 1:20