"The Desperate need today is not for a greater number of intelligent people, or gifted people, but deep people." Richard Foster - Celebration of Discipline
What is with this idea that the smarter we get the happier we will be? I agree to the point that we need a level of intelligence to make the wild world in which we live tamer thus making it easier to fulfill our basic needs of food, water, and shelter. But beyond that trying to make our kids happy intellectual geniuses is ridiculous. There is an underlying current in our schools to drive our kids like race horses in training. If you don't think it's evident look at all the standardized testing our kids go through to see if they are keeping up with everyone else in the basis studies Math and English. What about teaching and testing the ways of the heart; relationships, love, communications skills of compassion, understanding, and helping one another. I think this system is doing a great injustice to our kids future by leaving out the learning of our heart. We leave making them deeper people up to chance. That’s pretty risky because as we leave the educational system and our thrown into the world we lack the understanding of the internal compass of our heart. We then rely on our schooling derived intellect that tells us to pursue what our mind wants which leads us to the whole culture thing of materialism and a life filled with whole lot of superficial stuff.
Our only hope is real life experiences of failure, loss and God to bring us back to the realization that it is depth of our hearts which really matter. Maybe it’s no coincidence the most popular book every written the Bible whole premise is teach us the way of our heart. It has taken loss, failure and most of all God to take my life's experiences to bring me this deeper level. The deeper I get, the more in touch I get with my heart, the more joy I experience. I just wish someone would of taught me this matter of the heart just like I was taught science and math. I agree with Foster, the world needs deeper people. Deeper people know the truth of the heart. Think about a happy joy filled person that you know. Are they the smartest? Are they the wealthiest? Wait don't make the mistake of just looking on the surface to judge their level of joy. You probably will need to get deep with them to really KNOW.
