This Christian Life

Unconscious Ability

Lately, I’ve become aware of an idea that is very intriguing to me. It has quickly become a tool for understanding as I walk this path of life. I guess you’d call it stages of consciousness, or something like that, but I don’t know the proper name for it if it has one.

It goes in order:

Unconscious incompentance
Conscious inability
Conscious ability
Unconscious ability

Ever since I saw this, I have thought about many things in my life that fit somewhere along this path. For instance, have you ever gotten to be so good at something that you don’t have to think about how you do it when you do it? Doing this thing becomes more like an extension of your emotions or feelings than an external mechanism. You can just do it without thinking. Like playing the piano, driving a car, making your favorit meal, loving your children, mowing the lawn, praying, typing, skiing, using a certain piece of software, working a back hoe, smiling, adding numbers, or using a mouse. There comes a certain point where you reach unconscious ability. But in the beginning, there was a conscious effort to make that same thing happen. There was even a point where you didn’t know you couldn’t do something.

For much of my Christian life, many of the things I do have been in a state of unconscious ability, just due to the fact that I was raised in a Christian environment. Things became very natural for me. However, there was a point about 8 years ago where I had to force myself to go back to almost the beginning and take on an attitude of conscious inability. I had to relearn how to do many of the things as they related to my understanding of God and how I should live my life. Not that I was educated wrong. But I started to realize consciously that some of the things I was doing unconsciously stemmed from incorrect assumptions.

I finally feel like I’m doing things for the right reasons. Maybe the Christian life is built on the the idea that you can never completely live in the unconscious state. One must constantly check his/her motives for doing things.

Maybe, just maybe, it’s a daily cycle.