It occurred to me, as I listened to these former students share their lives, that most of the truths we taught them couldn t in fact be fully learned in adolescence. It s like trying to explain calculus to a person who knows only addition. Teenagers simply don t have the reservoir of experience to fully understand how true is God s truth. It takes time for some of these lessons to sink in. But, I could hear it in their stories now, after almost 20 years, leaving home, getting married, getting a job, and beginning to raise their own families.
Life has a strange way of testifying to the truth of Scripture.
Our job is to give the message. God s job is to massage it into the muscle and flesh of real life. Love is the lesson that lasts. At the end of our weekend, I had to smile when I thought of how few of our reminiscences and war stories cited a particular lesson I had taught or quoted a talk I had given. In fact, references to my talks and Sunday school lessons were pretty much entirely absent.