When you come into my office at the church and then sit at my desk, immediately to the left is a whole shelf filled with Bibles written in many different languages. English, Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, German, Latin, French, and there is even a Korean and I believe a Cree one in there for good measure as well. So, you may be asking yourself, can he read those? And the answer to that is sadly, no (more on that below). But while looking at them, I began to think about just how similar language learning and building our relationship with God are.

It is how this thought unfolded that I want to share with you all today.

Also, just as a reminder. If you haven’t done it yet, please go to the post of this past Sunday’s service. At the bottom of that post there is a survey that we are taking in order to plan out the future of our online Sunday Services. Likely in the near future there will also be such a survey for the rest of the blog as well, but currently there is no timeline on that.

But for now, read on to find out about how learning languages and building our relationship with God are more similar than you may think.

On the top of my list of admittedly nerdy hobbies that I am comfortable talking about in polite conversation rests Duolingo. For those of you who do not know, Duolingo is a language learning app that is accessible to pretty much everyone as long as they have a computer of any kind with the internet. While it is not the best thing in the world if you want to learn to speak another language (learning to do that with any amount of skill requires someone to talk to), but if you instead want to learn to read say, French, German, or Korean, all of these and a pile more languages are all available to you, free of charge.

This admittedly nerdy hobby of mine (I swear I like offroading too) is one that I think comes by my honestly. My mother is bilingual (faded Low German, as well as English), and my grandmother was a language powerhouse being proficient in four (English, Low and High German as well as French) so that learning to read new languages would be something of interest to me I think was largely a given.

At my pinnacle of language learning, I could, albeit with quite a bit of struggling, read English, French, German, Biblical Hebrew, Koine Greek (these two are not on Duolingo, but instead are the result of taking a Biblical Languages track in my degree program in Seminary), with a splash of Spanish and Java thrown in for good measure. And while to many, this may seem impressive or like a sign of me being smart, I am here to tell you as someone who has honest to goodness tried to put out a fire with lighter fluid, don’t be fooled. The truth is, learning to read a language is not a hard thing to do in the slightest. After all, young children learn to do it all the time, and from many hours of personal experience spent with a toddler over recent years, I can tell you with some authority, that if you are reading this article right now, you are smarter than a young child.

No, you don’t need to be smart to learn to read a new language. You don’t even need to be gifted in languages either (each new language I have attempted was a painful uphill battle to even get to the point of mediocrity, ask my Greek Professor, he will confirm this). Instead, all you need is some kind of resource (again Duolingo is free, or you could always take a course at Providence like I did [Go Pilots!]) and here is the kicker for most people, you also need to spend consistent time at it.

To learn to read a new language, nothing, and I mean nothing, is as important as simply this; spending time with it. If you spend 20 minutes a day, likely less time than you spent mindlessly scrolling on Facebook before you clicked on this article, trying to learn a language, I guarantee you that by this time next year you will be largely proficient at reading almost any language you choose to devote your time to (with the exception of Japanese, as Kanji are a nightmare). No smarts required. No special gifting. All you need is a small amount of consistent time.

Your relationship with God is like this too. Do you want to grow deeper in your relationship with Christ? Again, you don’t need to be smart to do that. You don’t need to be someone who can look at the Bible and seemingly automatically garner unseen details. You don’t need to be someone who can quote every verse at the drop of a hat either, let alone someone who spends half their life in prayer. You don’t even need to be some kind of special spiritual person either. All you need is consistent time. Say, 20 minutes a day. Not even a half-hour. Spend that amount of time every day on building your relationship with God, by reading your Bible, praying, reflecting and talking with others about your faith, and I guarantee you, in a year your relationship with God will have grown by leaps and bounds.

All it takes is consistent time.

But like all things this easy to accomplish, there are two pitfalls to watch out for. The first is that the time you spend needs to be consistent. If you spend three hours today, and then forget about it for a month and then spend three hours then, you are going to be in for a rough time. Will you learn and grow? Sure, but you are also going to find that a lot of that three-hour block of time is going to be spent simply relearning things you already knew but forgot.

Think of it like you are seeing an old friend that you haven’t spent time with in months. When you finally, after all that time apart get together again, almost certainly you are going to spend hours just catching up, and only after that will you talk about anything new. Learning languages and building your relationship with God is the same way. The longer you spend apart, the longer you will need to refresh before building something new. That is simply how the minds of most people work.

And the second pitfall, which is just an extension of the first, if you stop spending time either on languages or God completely, expect your understanding of either to fade more than you expect it will. Many of you probably noted that when I talked about all the languages I learned to read in my life, I talked about them in the past tense. Truth be told, not long ago I opened an old French copy of the Bible that I have in order to see how much I still remembered after some three years of a break from the language and I am here to tell you that it is not pretty. The same thing goes, sadly, for pretty much every language I listed above (save, thankfully, for English). Bits and pieces are still there, thankfully enough that I still know how to look things up, but apart from that, it is all gone. I don’t doubt if I tried hard and got back into the habit I could get it all back, but with everything in life in the way, work, kids, friends, hobbies, let’s just say there is a reason I let it all slide to begin with.

Our relationship with God is like this too. If you stop praying, reading your bible, reflecting on your faith and spending time talking with others about God, you will forget most of what you had built up with Christ. Bits and pieces of that relationship will remain, which does thankfully mean that likely it will be easier to get back to where things are than if you were starting with nothing, but just like learning a language, if you let your relationship with God fully slip, you shouldn’t be surprised that it will fade near completely.

So to sum all this up, learning a language, like building your relationship with God is not a matter of smarts or gifting. It is instead simply a matter of spending consistent time. Not even necessarily all that much time even, say just 20 minutes a day. Spend that every day and in a year I bet you will be shocked by just how much you have learned and grown. But fail to spend that time, and don’t be surprised when you find how much of your relationship or language has faded.

But now, with all that said I am interested, does anyone want to join me in trying to relearn French?