Concerted Effort

About a week ago, I opened a pack of Magic: the Gathering cards which included a copy of Odric, Lunarch Marshall. Odric, Lunarch Marshall is a legendary creature (a 3/3 human soldier for 3W) with an ability much like that of Concerted Effort, which I mention only because it'd make a better title for this blog post than anything I could come up with involving Odric's name.

Both of these cards have effects that basically say "if any one of your creatures has one of a list of special abilities, all of your creatures get that special ability." For example, if I had two creatures, and the first one had First Strike and the second one didn't, the second creature would "learn" First Strike from the first creature, and they would both have First Strike. Meanwhile, if the second creature had Vigilance and the first one didn't, the first creature would "learn" Vigilance from the second, so both creatures would end up having both First Strike and Vigilance.

That's one thing I like about White cards in Magic; they work together. They learn from each other and strengthen each other. We can do the same. No matter how much we know or can do, there are always facts, ideas, and skills we can learn from others. Similarly, we each have knowledge and experience that we can share with others. We all have many things to learn, and we all have many things to teach.

As long as we are humble enough to learn from others and generous enough to share what we know, we can all learn and grow together and become far more knowledgeable and skilled than any one of us would have been on our own. And if long as we include God in our "concerted effort," there's no limit to what we can learn and share with each other.

We followed this principle in a recent Priesthood meeting. The leader of the meeting asked the group to raise questions, then invited the group to volunteer answers to those questions. Between us, we were able to come up with satisfactory answers to all the questions we raised. At the start of the meeting, I had expected the head of the meeting to dispense information to us. Instead, he showed us that we already, collectively, had the answers we were looking for.

No one of us knows everything. We all have questions that we, by ourselves, don't have the answer to. But as we listen to the Spirit and to each other, we can learn from and teach each other, until all of us know what any of us know. We won't be able to learn from each other as quickly as my Magic cards can, but sharing what we know with each other seems to me to be a good way to learn.