We've been on the topic of lifelong learning of late and talking about your new book on this

topic, Pastor John, it's titled Foundations for Lifelong Learning, Education in Serious Joy.

In your new book you talk about the excitement of learning,

that's a phrase you use, the excitement of learning,

and you mentioned the joy of learning hundreds of times

implying throughout that there's a joy in discovery and a joy aim in this

discipline of lifelong learning. Now you and I both get fired up when it comes to

new discoveries that we find in the Bible or in old books by dead guys right and we

kind of talked about this in our episode before Thanksgiving, but speak today to someone who doesn't feel this joy of discovery, and they don't think of themselves as lifelong learners.

Maybe they never like school, maybe they didn't get very good grades in school, they're just

not wired to be lifelong students, not naturally.

Maybe they're more doers, more practical,

very practical, and not drawn to read hard books,

to the point that even your new book on lifelong learning would be a

daunting hard sell for them to even pick up and read. What encouragement

would you give to them? I'm reading this question and thinking, who am I actually going to talk to?

The hypothetical listener out there, yeah. Right, and they're probably not listening.

There are not just two kinds of response to lifelong learning.

There are five, ten, twenty, hundreds of ways people respond to things like lifelong learning.

Everyone is on a continuum from the most academically accomplished scholar at one end to the drug addict or the mentally ill person on the street outside my house that I spoke to yesterday, who cannot make an ordinary

conversation, has no concept of, let alone interest in the foundations of lifelong learning, and everybody is somewhere

in between those extremes.

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