Authors Note: This is a guest post by my friend Emily Smucker. Emily loves to learn, but it hasn’t always been that way. It took a difficult experience for God to help her learn to love learning. For a few years she struggled with West Niles virus and wrote about it in her book Emily (Check it out on Amazon here). To learn more about Emily and read her blog, visit emilysmucker.com.
The best stories aren’t just a list of events happening one after the other; the best stories are about change.
The funny thing about change, though, is that I don’t always notice it when it’s happening. It’s only much later that I realize, “you know, seven years ago I would have acted much differently in this situation.”
For instance, the other day a visiting preacher and his wife came over for lunch, and over a hearty bowl of cheeseburger soup they began to tell the story of her motorbike accident in Thailand a few months previously.
“It wasn’t that hard of an impact,” she said, “but somehow the ball in my shoulder joint broke clean off the bone.”
“They had to replace it with a prosthesis,” he added.
“Is there a reason they didn’t just set the bone pieces and let them grow back together?” I asked.
“Well, the ball was fractured in four places,” said the preacher. “The doctor told us that fracture lines would calcify over and eat away at her shoulder joint when she moved her arm, causing a lot of pain.”
“Oh interesting,” I said, and then we moved on to another topic.
“So what do you do?” they asked me a bit later, and when I said I was in college the preacher laughed and said, “I can tell that you’re interested in the medical field!”
“Oh no!” I corrected him. “I’m really not at all.”
“You just…like to know about…everything?”
“I guess you could say that, yes.”
It’s true that even though I’m not a musician, I like to know why the notes of a triad sound nice together. Though I’m not a microbiologist or a farmer, when I met a guy who adds microbes to farm soil for a living I talked to him for quite some time, wanting to know how much they actually affect yield. And finally, though I’ve never had even the slightest interest in working in the medical field, I still like to know about the healing process of bones.
This joy of learning for learning’s sake was nowhere to be found when I was in high school.
My family and peers were all extremely smart and caught onto things quickly. It always took me a while to grasp a new concept, and I missed a lot because my head was perpetually in the clouds.
Comparatively, I was the dumb one, and that’s how I viewed myself. I went to a lot of effort to not appear stupid. If I had a question I usually didn’t even bother to ask it, for fear my stupidity would be revealed for all to laugh at.
It’s hard to say where I’d be if I had continued living life with that way of thinking. In any case, I didn’t. Something came along that shook up my world, and one of the consequences was an unprecedented love of learning.
This is the story of how I learned to love to learn, and it begins five years ago, with a story about a girl living far from home, trying to piece her life back together after a long illness.
The Girl Who Homeschooled Herself
The Colorado sunshine beat down on my shoulders as I drove my little blue motorbike to the Canon City Public Library in September of 2009. I chained my motorbike to the bicycle rack and went inside. Instead of going upstairs to the young adult section like usual, I nosed around on the first floor until I came to the health section.
I had to write a research paper on a health topic. The logical choice was to write about West Nile virus, which had been plaguing me for two years, but when I looked at the library’s scanty selection of information on the subject I decided against it.
“Looks like there’s a lot of info on Alzheimer’s,” I said to myself, so I filled my arms with books about Alzheimer’s, checked them out, and stashed them in the compartment under the seat of my motorbike while I rode home.
I unlocked the back door of the little white house where I’d lived by myself for the past few months. My family was back in Oregon, in a wet moldy climate that I’d moved away from, hoping that the drier air of Colorado would benefit my health. It really was working, I realized as I spread my books out on the kitchen table. I’d basically given up on schoolwork due to my illness, and now I felt healthy enough to plough away at it again.
I just wanted to be finished.
Over a year had gone by since my high school graduation, and I had a worthless unsigned diploma in the bottom drawer of my file cabinet.
Trying to make the best of it, I bought pretty multi-colored note cards at Walmart, and sat for hours at the kitchen table, drinking orange Izze soda, taking notes, and trying to organize all that information.
One night, as I was diligently plugging away at it, I was struck by a fascinating thought: I was having fun.
Schoolwork had never been fun before. Maybe creative writing assignments, but certainly not research papers about old-people diseases.
Yet here I was, nineteen years old, homeschooling myself, and having fun.
What had changed? What clicked, then, that had never clicked before?
Maybe it was because I had nothing to prove anymore. My smart family was far away. I had no classmates to keep up with, because they had already finished and moved on with their lives. And so, with nothing left but me and my schoolwork, I saw it for what it really was: something interesting.
Despite the enjoyment I derived from finishing up the last segment of my high school work, I thought my intellect was average, at best. It wasn’t until I went to Sharon Mennonite Bible Institute (SMBI) in the late fall of 2009, just after I’d completed the last of my high school work, that I even questioned this notion.
The social aspect of SMBI was everything I had dreamed of and more, but switching from an individualized ACE school system to a classroom setting left me less than confident about the academic side of things. I loved my classes, but little things like note taking and MLA formatting left me feeling completely lost.
One day, as I sat in my Biblical Cultural Foundations class, my teacher handed out something else I’d never dealt with: the midterm study guide.
I looked at it and nearly had a panic attack. How on earth was this supposed to be helpful? Reading over that paper gave me the impression that this was going to be the hardest test in the universe.
A few days later I stood in front of the mirror combing my hair, trying not to feel panicked about my workload. My roommate stood beside me, pinning up her gorgeous waves of long, blonde hair.
“So, are you ready for your midterms?” she asked me.
“I don’t know,” I said, my panic seeping into the edges of my voice. “I mean, that Biblical Cultural Foundations test looks like it’ll be really hard…”
“Oh, you’ll do fine,” she brushed me off. “You’re really smart.”
Wait. Back up. She thought I was smart? Am I smart? I felt a strange and beautiful wave of confidence. Maybe I could do this, after all.
I got a 99% on the test. Boom! You know the way you feel when your crush walks into the room, or when you walk up the stairs at night and you think there’s another step but there actually isn’t? That’s how I felt when I pulled my test from my mail slot and saw my score written at the top of the page in red ink.
I think that’s when I began considering college a viable option. It was something I hadn’t thought much about before SMBI, but less than a year later I was back in the classroom, working toward my bachelor’s degree.
My life and my health took several more twists and turns after that, but my love of learning hasn’t diminished. It’s not something that’s confined to the classroom, of course. Sometimes you learn from professors, and sometimes you learn from visiting preachers who sit at your table and eat soup.
Here’s the thing, though. Although the love of learning has brought many blessings into my life, it isn’t something I chose for myself. It’s a gift that God gave me, slowly, as I followed His leading through difficult times.
When I got sick with West Nile virus, I knew, in my head, that God had a plan. However, I had no clue what that plan was. I wanted to know so badly. I thought it would be much easier to cope with my illness if I could see something good coming from it.
It’s interesting, looking back, to see all the small ways that God has redeemed that awful period of my life and made good things come of it. Not one good thing, but many. The opportunity to publish a book. The chance to meet fascinating life-changing people as I moved around the country in an effort to find health. The ability to empathize with people who have suffered.
Not only that, but God used the upheaval of my life at that point to change me by teaching me to love learning, and for that I will always be grateful.
