Your Training Won’t Make Sense at First

Image by Bart via Flickr. CC-BY-NC 2.0

“Why do we have to learn math? We’ll never use it in real life!”

Did you ever say something like that to your teachers in school?

It’s true that you may never have used algebra once you graduated from high school. Your knowledge of trigonometry or calculus may have lain dormant since then, too.

But that wasn’t actually the point of algebra, or any other subject.

The point of learning math was to train your brain.

Mastering mathematical concepts increases your problem-solving skills, develops flexible thinking and creativity, and encourages analytical reasoning.

These are things that are extremely valuable in every area of life.

But you might not have been able to see that when you were trying to understand the Pythagorean theorem in school.

That’s because your training often won’t make sense until much later.

Several heroes in the Bible found this out:

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Get Ready for God to Act

Pouring cupcake batter into prepared muffin tins.
Photo by Gina Dittmer.

When you read a cake or muffin recipe, it will usually instruct you to preheat your oven and get your baking pans prepared before describing how to make the dessert itself.

But why do it in this order? Why not make the batter first, and let it sit there in the bowl while you leisurely grease or line the baking pans and let the oven slowly heat up?

There’s a very good reason to have everything prepared before you start the actual baking, and it has to do with how leaveners behave.

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