CURIOSITY

Seth Godin tells a story about sun tea. He starts by telling us that he was wrong about sun tea. The story about sun tea goes something like this.
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Put some tea bags in a mason jar filled with fresh, cold water. Put it in the sun. Four hours later, smooth and delicious tea is waiting for you. The photons from the sun go through the clear glass and the water, strike the leaves and transfer radiant energy to the tea.
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This isn’t actually what happens.

It turns out that the sun simply warms the water a bit, and tea happens. You can make cold water tea in the fridge more safely, because it keeps the water cold (though it takes much longer).

Of course, the lesson has nothing to do with tea. Or even beverages.

It’s that I was enamored with the story and stopped being curious. It would have been easy to set up the experiment. Worse, I never bothered to look it up. It was better, apparently, to feel right than to know what was actually happening.
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Curiosity is a choice.

This analogy can be applied to our faith lives. We can get to the point in our lives where we think we have God and faith all figured out. We can stop being curious about how God is calling us to be in this world. We know what we know, and we have no intention of exploring further.

If we read up on human development, we find that we are born with questions - in other words, curiosity. Children ask between 300-400 questions per day up until the age of four (I am thinking and praying for parents of young ones as I write this), and then it drops off significantly throughout our lives.

What happens when we grow up and get old? Why do we agree to stop asking those beautiful questions?

I have plenty of questions that I am still exploring in this life. One way that I explored some of those questions was through the Apprentice Series.

The Apprentice Series offers no simple formulas or secret paths to knowledge. Instead, the Apprentice Series offers the chance to be with Jesus and discover the God Jesus knows and the Kingdom he proclaimed. You can learn more here.

Stay curious.

Peace,
Travis Segar
Pastor for Care and Community