Learning by Heart is Not Mere Memorization
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Education continues to be dominated by an emphasis on memorization. Memory is certainly desirable if there is something of value to be learned; but durable memory is the result of deep understanding—not incessant drill.
Medical schools continue to fixate, especially in the first two years, on memorizing as much as possible of a fire hose spewing out information. The pressure to remember in medical school is enormous and yet much of this content is soon discarded by the brain as “wood, hay and stubble.” What’s retained is what is actually useful in solving problems. Problem-diagnosing followed by problem-solving is actually the job description of practicing physicians.
What follows is an approximate transcript of an interview with Dr. Nathan Smith, a cardiothoracic surgeon who learned early the value of deep and durable learning:
[00:04] Mike Gray: Join me today for another in this series that I call “Tales of Transformation.” Today I'm joined by cardiothoracic surgeon Dr. Nathan Smith. As a college sophomore, he experienced the liberation that comes with transformational learning. In this podcast, he explains how a focus on understanding and deep learning informs his Christian faith as well as his life as a surgeon. Well, we're joined today by Dr. Nathan Smith, who is a cardiothoracic surgeon and he is going to be sharing with us today about the circumstances in which he had a paradigm shift in his approach to learning. Thank you for joining today, Nathan.
[01:02] Nathan Smith: Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
[01:04] Mike Gray: Do you actually have a clear recollection of this paradigm shift in your learning that has set your learning objectives on a different path, perhaps than many others of your peers? Is there a particular spot that you could identify?
[01:29] Nathan Smith: It's quite interesting how much clarity surrounds that particular event, and you were intimately involved in it, similar to my wife's experience in Essentials of Cell Biology, our sophomore level class. Roughly two months into that class, you explicitly taught us that this was not going to be something we could memorize our way through. We had to actually deeply grasp and understand the concepts thoroughly. I came to a conclusion in the middle of studying, I think it was some aspect of the cell cycle, and I realized that there had to be something that was true about a particular aspect of the cell cycle that had to exist. But I'd never actually read or encountered it. And after discussing with you a couple of days later, I verified that, yes, indeed, that particular pathway, enzyme and set of products does exist. But what was funny is I felt a little dishonest because I initially came to the conclusion and walked around for a couple of hours thinking, oh, yeah, that's true, and then realized that I hadn't ever read it, and so therefore felt like I was dishonest in thinking about it or discussing it as if it was true. But that big paradigm shift was that if the knowledge that I was able to obtain was thorough, deep, founded all the way down to the very roots of the system, that I could work within that system to easily make valid conclusions and applications. I don't know that there are many life events that are as clearly remembered in my mind as that moment.
[03:11] Mike Gray: So, was it the satisfaction of having one of your conclusions, inferences, whatever you want to call them, verified as being real? Or was it the threat that memorization was not going to work? Or exactly what changed in your approach about two months in?
[03:35] Nathan Smith: Yeah, I think it was almost like I finally arrived at a source of saying it as a source of truth, I don't think is quite right, because I don't think science is a source of truth. It's founded on truth. But I think the satisfaction of realizing that I could be independently given parts and pieces and legitimately and truly put them together into something that worked, I guess, in its most abstract form.
[04:10] Mike Gray: What did that process involve? This season, we're talking about transformational learning that involves a disorienting dilemma that normally causes you to address assumptions to determine if they're justified or if you have the wrong set of assumptions. So, within that kind of a framework, what changed? I'm hearing satisfaction coming out of the experience.
[04:40] Nathan Smith: I like your focus on the memorization part. I had never been terribly good at memorizing.
[04:46] Mike Gray: Interesting.
[04:47] Nathan Smith: Now, if you'd look at my test scores, you'd say, oh, you're fine at memorizing. But it was always laborious and difficult, and I would often spend time thinking about the subject and things that I enjoyed, which was very broad. I always have had extremely broad interests, but if I enjoyed it, I didn't have to memorize it. I could just sit there and know it. After spending time thoroughly digesting it and understanding it, the way that you taught us in Essentials was to make that your habit. To not seek to learn anything apart from a deep understanding of it. And it was really freeing. I think it finally sort of gave legitimacy to how I had approached things all along, but from other educational perspectives, I've just been told, just memorize this data, attach this term with this set of words, attach this term to that date, do this set of math facts. It never really felt like I was learning anything because I'd just have to memorize it again for the final exam. Whereas I finally, after going through this deep learning concept that you explained, it was, aha, I can finally just learn it and never have to go back to it again because it's ingrained, as you say, deeply learned.
[06:04] Mike Gray: So, did it all feel threatening to move from the certainty of “the teacher said it, so this is going to be on the test?” To, “if I understand, then there are things that I should be able to do, but I don't know necessarily on the test, which kinds of things I'm going to be expected to do?”
[06:24] Nathan Smith: I don't recall it feeling particularly threatening. Liberation was really the primary feeling, and I think I'm probably in the minority on that point. There's a certain security with being able to just hear black and white truth and learn it from an authority, I suppose I've always been a little quietly rebellious and wanted to really understand things, as opposed to just accept them, because I was told so.
[06:54] Mike Gray: On the previous podcast with your wife, we talked about the difference between supposedly learning the “what” as opposed to learning the what in the context of the “so what,” right?
[07:08] Nathan Smith: Yeah.
[07:09] Mike Gray: So, it sounds like making that connection that I'm actually addressing the so what, including what that idea can do when I properly connect it up and help it to make the way plain for solving problems.
[07:29] Nathan Smith: Well, Joy and I were talking about this as we were pondering these podcast sessions about the reason for learning. I mean, we went to school to learn, but the learning had an endpoint, and the endpoint was just what you just said it was, problem solving. How to take a challenge that's just popped up in your life, in your career, and make it work, to make it do something for the advancement of society, for the improvement of whatever you're working on for the benefit of your children, for the benefit of your patient’s life, in my career, at least, is constant problem solving. And being able to have a deep learning philosophy that really permeates pretty much everything that I do allows me to grasp concepts so thoroughly that when I'm in the middle of a crisis, I don't have to go back and look it up. I don't have to spend a lot of time thinking and processing. The answers often become quite self-apparent as soon as the unexpected incident occurs.
[08:38] Mike Gray: So, can you give us kind of a thumbnail sketch of how this kind of approach has affected the development of your expertise as a surgeon?
[08:50] Nathan Smith: Yeah, I can think of three prominent ones. So, first off, when I got to medical school, it was very disheartening. My first two months, I tried to deep learn everything that was thrown at me and spend hours and hours and hours really digesting and understanding it. And as the phrase goes, drinking out of a fire hydrant. Your first year of medical school, that was impossible, and I ended up sliding from what I was used to being in kind of the top 10% of my class down into the bottom third. And so, I did have to reorient. And instead of trying to deep learn everything, it felt like a regression. I had to slip backwards into just memorizing massive amounts of information. And I understand why medical school is constructed that way because there's such a large gap of information, or, sorry, a large birth of information that is required to know. For a physician, however, I still have some question as to whether the current way of our education of physicians is actually appropriate. I think that incorporating teaching people how to think as opposed to just flooding them with massive amounts of information is probably a better way, but that would take us off into another hour-long discussion.
[10:12] Mike Gray: I'm sure I would say amen to that.
[10:15] Nathan Smith: Yeah. What's interesting is throughout my education, so the second year I made some changes to my study style, where instead of trying to spend hours deep learning stuff, I just basically had three passes over the information. And that allowed me to grasp most of it. And I think I retained probably about half of what I learned during that time, maybe a little more. But I would start my day late at about 10:00 after two lectures had already been given. I would review my notes from the previous day for the 10:00 hour. And then from eleven to twelve, I would listen to that morning's 08:00 and 09:00 hour lecture at two times speed. And that allowed me to cram in those two sets of lectures. And I would take notes during that time, take a break for lunch, 12:30 01:00 and then continue following through the day listening at two times. And by the time I got to about three or four, when the classes ended, I had one more set of lectures to listen to. And then, so I was done with all that at 430, from 430 to 630, I would rewrite my notes from the day. So that would be my second pass through the information. And then in the evening, whatever activities were going on, then I would polish up on things I needed or go to a lab or whatever. And then the next morning I would hit that same information from the previous day a third time. And so that was just a way to bump myself back up into the upper half of the class. And that worked pretty well for me. But I say all that because as soon as I started my third and fourth year, the pace of information download slowed because I was dealing with patients. I was seeing patients in and out every day. And occasionally I was asked to give lectures as a way to learn on some individual patient's presentation or problem or a drug or things like that. And then I had the time to do the deep learning and to spend 2 hours thinking about the cardiac cycle or the Krebs cycle and its genetic diseases and things like that. And so by the time I finished my fourth year, I was well known within my class for being the guy that could recognize a heart attack walking into the ED a mile away, while some of the people that scored in the top 2% of the class were still sitting there thumbing through their encyclopedias trying to figure out what was going on. And it's because of that deep learning business. If you understand what is going on from a deep level, the 25 manifestations of having a heart attack notwithstanding, you can sit there and think, oh, I'm familiar with this environment. I know what's going on here because I know it in and out and top to bottom.
[13:00] Mike Gray: So, I think the role of questions is maybe part of what you're talking about, too, because you're learning to ask questions. Maybe that even was true when you're in memorization mode, your approach, like, what good is this? Or is there a way to organize this in my mind mentally? Or if this, then what would be a result of a dysfunction of this level? So do you think maybe internalizing questions was a common denominator that then leads out to. Obviously, in the practice of medicine, if the patient can cooperate with you and answer your questions, it's helpful, but you're going to try and get answers to questions so that you can move toward diagnosing the situation. What do you think about that?
[13:57] Nathan Smith: Yeah, I think that is probably what is going on, though I'm not aware in the moment of asking specific questions. And it may be that at the current level of my practice, I do a lot of that automatically. And I've seen so many clinical scenarios that all somebody has to do is walk in with nausea, vomiting, shooting chest pain, and a decreased blood pressure. And I'm already thinking aortic dissection. It's not something that I have to ask. I wonder what's going on, or I wonder if this was broken, if that would lead to those set of symptoms. And again, that's part of what I do as a cardiac surgeon, as opposed to someone that does rheumatology or internal medicine. And their job description is a little bit more of being Sherlock Holmes, trying to tease out one of 80 different potential diagnoses. My job is to be a little bit more of a Navy SeaL and kind of run in for the kill, get it done, hurry up and salvage the person that's dying there in the emergency room, and then pull away and kind of deal with the aftermath and the things that need long, hard thinking a little bit later.
[15:06] Mike Gray: The apostle Paul, in First Corinthians, chapter 13, verse eleven, says, when I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child, but when I became a man, I put away childish things. So, within the context of transformational learning, what do you think is the difference that Paul's getting at between thinking as a child and thinking as a man?
[15:35] Nathan Smith: Yeah. I've often looked at that verse and wondered about the morality of it. When I was young to follow Paul here, I used to think of this as like, the child is sinful or wrong. And then when he became a man, he put away those wrong things. But I'm not sure that's what he's getting at. In the context of First Corinthians 13, he's talking about love and its various aspects, and I really think it may be just more. I guess this is why you brought this up, because it's kind of like what we're talking about. When you're a child, you make assumptions without even realizing it. You take things for granted. You say, yes, ma'am, no, sir, and accept the things that are given to you. But then as you become older, you really learn to drill down into the reasons behind it and to understand, like you said, the so what, the whys and have a more thorough understanding of it all. And so, I don't think it's wrong to have childish understanding unless you're a 35 year old man and more is expected of you.
[16:45] Mike Gray: Well, and I know because you've told me that you went through a period about 20 years ago when you had great doubt about Christianity. So how did you deal with your doubts?
[17:00] Nathan Smith: Yeah, well, as you can imagine, that was rather unsettling. And it occurred about the same time as I was drilling down and kind of getting rid of my assumptions during Essentials of Cell Biology. All of that kind of happened during my sophomore year as I was wrestling through. “Well, why do I really believe what's going on? I can't trust what I thought about science and math and history. Can I trust what I'm learning about Christianity?” So that was a very upsetting time, as you can imagine, being in a Christian college and growing up in a Christian home. I guess it was a little scary is probably the right word for it because I didn't feel like I could ask anybody about it because they all think I was a know. I'd risk getting tossed out of the community. But I had two mentors, one of whom you know very well, Brent Cook, who taught theology. And I took multiple classes with him. And he actually was the best man at my wedding. He became such a good friend. And then also Mike Barrett's son, Chuck Barrett, was a mentor of mine at the time. And both of them encouraged me to ask God the big questions. He is a big guy. He can handle it. And that was really liberating to hear from two guys that had had similar experiences themselves. And so, I started asking the big questions. Why do we think God exists? Are the scriptures truly reliable? Do the stories fit together? Do the stories match history? Does history match the stories? Does the theology have a cohesive whole? Or is it just a loose collection of stories? So, the way that I dealt with my doubts was by asking questions and digging down and finding answers. And I was in an environment where the answers were readily available to me. I think you and I, I'm not sure if you recall, but you and I had a conversation or two about these matters, and you had good answers for some of the non-Christian views of science and how they didn't really hold water. We had lots of discussions in Essentials and then in subsequent genetics and other classes about the bankruptcy of the evolutionary understanding of science. And it really started to poke holes in what I saw in the secular community. And because I drilled down all the way in the previous year, by the time I got to my junior and senior year, I felt very comfortable looking at pseudoscientific claims and realizing, oh, that doesn't hold water. That doesn't make sense, that's not logical, that's not founded on anything. And I could say that and believe that and hold those concepts as valid because I had drilled all the way down and built it back up. And so, again, the deep learning was something that not just affected my practice now, but also affected the way that I think, the way that I think about truth, the way that I think about God. All of this was going on at the same time at a very crucial point in my life. And your influence and the influence of others like you at Bob Jones, are really very helpful to me.
[20:23] Mike Gray: It's interesting, when we talk about doubt, some people just don't want to go there. Some of our listeners may view doubt as intrinsically sinful. So, is there a wrong way to deal with doubt, or is doubt just a problem that needs to be acknowledged? As God's given me plenty of revelation, and I'm just not processing it. And so, it's probably not a good thing that I'm experiencing doubt. What would you say about that?
[21:03] Nathan Smith: Well, first, I don't think it's possible to answer that question without a scriptural foundation. If the Bible is not something that you hold as truth, I don't think you can answer the question. It will all eventually devolve into, well, I feel this way, or I don't feel this way. But if you take a scriptural foundation, then that allows an easy answering of the question. Basically, the question is, is it wrong to doubt? And the answer is a resounding no. We understand that the scriptures teach that Jesus never committed a sin, that he was the perfect man. And yet on the cross he quotes psalm 22. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? The son of God himself was experiencing doubt there as he was being crucified. And then David himself experiences this in multiple psalms. He records for us Asaph. Why do the heathen prosper? Why do these bad guys make it? And they're fat and full and lots of kids, and they die and have a good burial. And here I am, little old me, trying to do right, and I'm suffering. And so, if we admit that doubt is sinful, then we have to say that, well, pretty much everybody in the Bible, including Jesus, was abjectly wicked. I don't think we can make that conclusion.
[22:27] Mike Gray: So, to deny doubt is like a lack of personal honesty about where am. And you've already indicated God can handle your doubts. The book of Job is one place where Job makes some startling statements to God. Some other people, some of his so-called friends are abhorred by. They abhor what he's saying, like you're completely off base. And at times he was, but it was in pursuit of a genuine relationship with God. There was never this sense of, I don't even think you're there. It was more of a sense of, I don't understand why this is going on. Can you help me understand why this is going on? Can you at least interact with my problem that this thing is happening and you're a good God? This lack of realism when I'm dealing with what's going on in my own mind, I think is a key problem with trying to deny the existence of doubt. You mentioned all these folks, not just Bible, but your own friends and associates who had taken somewhat of a similar journey with doubt. And I can add other people that I know as well. To me, the doubt issue is kind of like immunization, like heightening the immune system. If you say, I have never doubted for one moment, it's probably because your spiritual immune system, as it were, has never been exposed to something that challenged it—that it needed to take notice of.
[24:28] Nathan Smith: Yes.
[24:28] Mike Gray: And if you keep pushing doubt down, keep pushing it away, keep trying not to deal with it, you may eventually get a case of counteracting your belief system to the point where you want to give it all up, as opposed to dealing with doubts as they arise and letting God speak through his word and through mentors who are properly applying his word that your immunity to unfaithful representations of God and to slanderous individuals, to those who would deny the truth that's recorded in scripture, your ability to withstand that is going to grow incrementally as you are honest about your doubts.
[25:24] Nathan Smith: Yes. What do you think about my statements earlier about without the scriptural foundation, things tend to just devolve into your feelings being run by. That's legitimate?
[25:38] Mike Gray: Yeah. Modern people tend to put things on an emotional feeling level rather than a cognitive level. And some of that's because truth is troubling to them.
[25:53] Nathan Smith: It can be troubling for a sophomore student, in Essentials too.
[25:57] Mike Gray: The idea that there is a truth giver and we're all accountable to him. Part of it, I think, is the bottom line has to be, are you willing, assuming truth does exist, because we're all living in this universe where we keep bumping up against reality that we are unable to control. Are you even accepting of the idea that there is a reality that I am accountable to, whether I feel good about it or not, whether I find that a comforting prospect or a threatening prospect, I think is all the difference in the world. So one of my sons, when he was unsaved in college age, a mentor simply told him, because for my son at that time, it would have been more comforting to him that there was no God. The mentor simply said, well, would you tell God if he exists, that it's okay that he exists? Is that a possibility? Or is it like that's dead-on-arrival? Because that notion gets in the road of me living the kind of life I want to live. Would you even give space for that idea? Would you pray for God to make himself known to you if he's out there? And some people would say no. At the bottom, I don't want to live in a universe ruled by a God who makes all the rules and I'm accountable to him. So, Romans one is the classic of people being willfully ignorant. Like, there's some things I just don't want to know.
[27:41] Nathan Smith: Yeah, well, you know, C. S. Lewis, even as a Christian said, I really would prefer that God just left me alone. But that is not the type of universe that we live in.
[27:53] Mike Gray: No. And God doesn't leave us alone for our own good.
[27:56] Nathan Smith: Yes.
[27:56] Mike Gray: He doesn't want to leave us where we.
[27:58] Nathan Smith: Yes.
[28:00] Mike Gray: There's a currently popular movement asking people to deconstruct their Christian faith. What I'm hearing from you, I don't think the word deconstruction applies. So how would you articulate the difference between what you went through and what you think is healthy and deconstruction?
[28:26] Nathan Smith: I'm not sure that I wouldn't have used the word deconstruct to describe it, and I'm not familiar with this movement, but I wonder if people haven't gotten excited about it, because it does bear an element of truth, at least in the initial description of it. Because what I did in my sophomore year was examine everything. I examined my understanding of who man is, what is a man, what is a woman, what is our nature, what's our design, what are we here for? Those kind of basic questions. And then as I dug into the Jewish scriptures, the Old Testament, the Torah, and then looked at the Quran and looked at various major world religions and how people approached all those things, it was very much a deconstruction of, in the sense that I took down the Christian house of theology that I had understood as a child and examined each individual part. And after confirming each individual part or making a decision about the veracity of each individual part, the final house ended up looking like Christianity, but like a very different Christianity than I'd grown up with, at least in the way that I thought about it. It was no longer just a set of traditions and practices. It was something that, like you mentioned earlier, it was a relationship with God. It was a fundamental understanding of who I am and who other people are. And I very much resonated with, again, C. S. Lewis's comment that I see Christianity not just because I see it, but because by it I see everything else. Seeing somebody that could commit great wickedness on the one hand, and then have an astounding scientific discovery on the other hand, or murder somebody and then make a beautiful piece of music, or live a life full of immorality, and then at the same time have great art as part of their legacy, those things, and understanding the nature of man as being made in God's image and yet fallen those types of things, and I could multiply examples are what really solidified me into my understanding of the Christian faith and acceptance of it, but it felt like a deconstruction. Do you have any comments on what people are doing as they deconstruct? Can you describe that to me?
[31:02] Mike Gray: And I think it gets back to some of the things we've talked about already in this podcast. I work on my house a lot. I've done lots of projects around and changed the nature of the house. There's probably nothing that hasn't been touched at one time or another, but the house is still here. And it's not that I at some point took things apart with the notion that I'm never going to put this back together. I'm going to put this back together perhaps in a different way. Or perhaps there's a piece of this, that the house had termite damage when we bought it, for instance, and we got some financial compensation for that. But deconstruction, I think, doesn't automatically lead to reconstruction.
[31:49] Nathan Smith: It's more demolition.
[31:50] Mike Gray: It's like accumulating doubt that I've not dealt with properly gets me to the point where I despair of the truth of the whole thing and I'm done with dealing with the pieces of it and I'm just going to tear the whole house down. Demolition. As opposed to a salutary addressing of doubts as they come up. I think historically there have been people who've not felt like they were in a position to deal with doubts as they came up, who eventually get to this critical mass of doubt that causes them to throw the whole thing off and be unwilling to consider that. Maybe it's because their experience has accumulated so many problems that they can't address the emotional energy necessary to deal with each one of these doubts independently. And sometimes it's poor teaching or its lack of time in the scriptures, lack of anybody supporting their need to know. Previous generations, mine and definitely my parents’ generation. It was a horrible thing. If you ever admitted that you had any doubts about Christianity. Yeah. It was like you're slipping away. God has spoken, and who are you to speak out against God? So, I think part of it is just this lack of addressing doubts as they come up and deciding at some point I'm going to tear the whole house down.
[33:37] Nathan Smith: Yeah. Very much a feeling driven behavior.
[33:40] Mike Gray: Yeah, I just feel frustrated with the whole thing. And maybe I'm on the outs with my society because of this. I'm the odd guy on the block. I'm the only one who doesn't think that fill in the blank is appropriate. And there's so many of these things that make me stick out and I can't even give you a reason why those things are true. Except my upbringing, which must have been flawed in some substantial way.
[34:10] Nathan Smith: Yep. Well, there's all sorts of high-profile examples of that I think of. You know, I kissed dating goodbye. That was a good decade and a half. And then he dove off the deep end. And then Sandra McCracken’s husband, you know, had two kids with her and everything's going great. They're both singing a bunch of Christian music and then boom, off he goes. And off the deep end. Totally get that.
[34:33] Mike Gray: So, Nathan, we've talked about the development of your expertise over time, but the systematic classroom orientation can't account for everything. And yet you need to be prepared for situations where there's an emergency, where the patient will present with some kind of pattern that you've not seen before. And then I think probably you're going to access a system of interconnected concepts that are referenced as you mentally ask questions about the patient who's on the table in front of you. Has that happened?
[35:21] Nathan Smith: Well, yes. The work that I do now as a cardiothoracic surgeon is not just specific technical workings of the heart itself. The heart's connected to the entire body, and so I'm not allowed to pigeonhole into just one isolated aspect of the human body. I have to maintain an awareness of all of the body. As an example of this, I was operating on a young man recently with mitral valve endocarditis, an infection of one of his heart valves. And my plan was to go in and excise the valve and replace it with an artificial valve. But when I got there, the infection had spread much more drastically than we had expected, based on imaging that had been done 30, 45 minutes earlier and a good portion of the structural integrity of the heart had been compromised. That was a scenario that I had distantly read about in other parts of the heart, but I'd never encountered in that specific location. And so in the moment, I've got this guy on the operating table. We're on a heart lung bypass machine. I really only have about 3 hours to fix and finish all this before we start running into major complications. Having spent twelve years of medical school, residency, multiple fellowships, I had all of these. It was like a massive mobile up in my head of interconnected concepts. And so, I was able to come to a conclusion that led me to the right approach to be able to excise that area, reinforce it appropriately, and make a couple extra steps in the process to be able to get that guy off the table. And by God's grace, he walked out of the hospital a couple of weeks later. But the interconnectedness of all of those concepts, just like back in my sophomore year, at that first “Aha” moment in Essentials, I realized that I could make legitimate and valid conclusions based on my understanding of all of the interconnected parts of that system.
[37:31] Mike Gray: And that sounds a lot like what I have told students in that same course, the sophomore course, when they come in for a test, wanting to continually review terms and bold face terms in particular or in general, just go through their notes. I say your goal really is to be mentally organized. And when I say mentally organized, I'm really talking about that interconnected network of concepts where there's a reason why pushing here causes a reaction there. That kind of mental organization is priceless, especially in the moment when a patient's life is at stake.
[38:18] Nathan Smith: It sure is.
[38:21] Mike Gray: Well, to wrap up, let me ask you one other question. Mark Twain, or maybe Will Rogers once said, “we're all ignorant just about different things.” I think that's a great place to end. Why do you think that's a salutary note to sound when we talk about transformational learning?
[38:47] Nathan Smith: It may sound kind of funny coming from a cardiac surgeon, but that is so true that we are all so ignorant just about different things. It really creates a foundation for humility, realizing that we all have an individual capacity for whatever our level of expertise is in various areas. And you have expertise in teaching and knowledge and microbiology. I've got it in cardiac physiology and surgical procedures. But there are so many details out there that it really is impossible to deep learn everything. And so, this really grants a wonderful freedom and that you can find in that humility, understanding that other people have spent their own time deep learning some aspect of society, some aspect of theology or practice or expertise. And it's wonderful to be able to get together. I'm reminded of one of the verses in Revelation where God gives each believer a small white stone on which is written a name that only he and God know. And there's some aspect of God that each individual gets to see that none of the rest of us do. And we get to spend eternity sharing it with everybody and telling that which we see, which other people don't. So, I think it's a wonderful phrase.
[40:15] Mike Gray: Intellectual humility, though, I think, is a key ingredient of being a so-called lifelong learner. That the way that I grow is to be open to recognizing what I don't know and would like to know and have reasons that will help me to move through the process of engaging to the point where I actually do know, because I do understand. Life is just full of opportunities like that, if we'll look around us, and all of those are opportunities for personal growth and growth and gratitude that we get to be on such a beautiful planet with things so well-orchestrated by our faithful, loving Creator. Thanks for being with us today.
[41:13] Nathan Smith: I appreciate the privilege.
[41:19] Mike Gray: Join me in two weeks for a compelling interview with Dr. Valerie Coffman as she shares her struggles with infertility and loss and how these threatened her identity as a woman. Valerie asks hard questions with transparency and directness because she wants her story to bless others.