I believe in the value of practice. I believe that practice makes perfect, even if it takes a long time. I believe there are very few things I am good at, personally, that didn’t come by way of practice – rote repetition.
I also believe the big question about practice is not about effectiveness, but motivation. Do you practice to get better at something, or do you practice because you love that something already? Which comes first: practice, or love?
Through the years I’ve known a lot of people who started running because they wanted to do a marathon. This is a worthy goal for sure, but almost all of them stop running after the marathon and never pick it back up. It wasn’t running they loved, but being a marathoner.
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Sometimes we do things because we simply want to be the sort of person who does things like that; sometimes we do things because we enjoy them.
The writing advice books say if you want to be a writer, you have to write all the time. That should be obvious, but few do it. Most people who say they want to be writers seldom write. Maybe they’re waiting for inspiration. Or maybe what they really want is to be published. They don’t want to write, to practice, they just want to have written. They don’t want to do it, they want to be done.
My young musician friend, Jason, while driving across the country returning to college, stopped at highway rest stops along the Intestate so he could practice his tuba for an hour. Right beside the highway. He couldn’t stand to drive one more mile without playing. Now, if you ask him about it he might say was practicing to make sure he didn’t fall behind his tuba rivals, but I doubt that was the real reason. People who practice beside the highway do it because they love to play.
I thought of another example: dancing. My loving wife, Cyndi, enjoys dancing for the pure joy of movement. She likes the physical connection between body and soul and sound and joy and heart. She likes to dance for the sake of dancing. Me, I like to dance, but not for the same reasons. It isn’t really dancing that I like – it’s Cyndi that I like – but dancing puts me close to her and allows me a glimpse into her passion. She is a dancer, I am an admirer. If you want to know the truth, dancing frightens me a bit. I am never comfortable or relaxed. I always seem to move too slowly, or I don’t turn enough, or I do the same step over and over. However, I try it anyway because I want to understand this part of Cyndi’s life, and experience a small bit of her joy.
But here is something else I think about practice. If you stay at it, you can learn to love almost anything. Maybe you learn juggling simply to impress your future mother-in-law, but if you stay at it and practice and hang around other jugglers, you might find you love it yourself. You may even continue to work and practice even after the future mother-in-law angle stops being a motivation.
I started running back in 1978 to lose weight and win a young girl’s heart. I had no love for running itself; it was just the cheapest and least-coordinated form of exercise I could do. But I kept at it, practicing, every day. The longer I ran, the more important it became to me. Eventually, it was running itself that I enjoyed, and I ran, practiced, to get better at it.
There are some loves that can only be learned through discipline and practice. That’s been my experience with Christianity.
I’ve learned that if I do the practice: read from my Bible every day, read spiritual books, pray, find time for solitude and searching, share and teach what I’ve learned, memorize and meditate, get around other believers and let them influence me, listen to good teaching and preaching … and all that; well, if I’m true to the practice, the truth comes to me. Through constant practice, Christianity makes sense beyond my rational mind; it makes sense in my heart and soul.
And one more thought: Practice lets me follow the pathways someone else has already cleared; not unlike following a mountain trail. I don’t have to be the first to hike this trail. I don’t have to bushwhack through the tall brush hacking out a new path to God. Many others have gone this way before me, and I can learn from them and benefit from their trail markings and maps. I can follow their practice.
