Becoming an Expert

I used to write a lot of poetry. I wrote so much poetry, I even started to read poetry. As far as I can tell, that’s the main audience for a poet: other poets. I started writing poetry in high school. I probably wrote a lot of “Roses are Red,” poems even in junior high. Poems like:

Roses are Red
Violets are Blue
Your shirt has polka dots
So does your face.

I was really into the twist at the end: the surprising insult combined with the surprising non-rhyme really tickled my funny bone.

My junior and senior years of high school I really amped it up. I wish I had an example of one of those poems to share, to make my point a little more dramatic, but I think I threw them out in a fit of embarrassment a few years ago. Those high school poems were really, really terrible. I didn’t realize how bad I was at writing poetry at the time. I knew they weren’t the greatest poems, but I hadn’t yet realized they were actually the worst. So, in college, I kept writing poems. All the way through college, I wrote poems. Here’s a poem I wrote after staying up all night as a college freshman:

Ink on Nose

When I write on my nose, I wonder whether the ink grows over a pimple.
Pimple, dimple, hemple, stemple,
nose grows
ink knows
pimple flows to my toes.

Not good. Not only was I writing bad poetry, I was also still fighting acne. It was a cry for help.

By the time I graduated from college, though, I was a really good poet. I got the prime reader’s slot at poetry gatherings. I won a poetry contest. I even briefly considered becoming a professional poet (but, then again, there aren’t many professions I haven’t briefly but seriously considered).

Between the first batch of poems I wrote in high school and the last poem I wrote while I was still in college, I wrote hundreds of poems. I spent thousands of hours explaining to the poetry-reading public (other poets) how much I wanted a girlfriend. I got better at writing poetry because I wrote a lot of poetry. The same principal applies to every endeavor we have on this earth. And we know it. It’s not a surprise. If you want to be good at anything, you have to practice. There’s a popular book that I have heard quoted dozens of times, while I have not even bothered to learn the title, that says that it takes 10,000 hours of doing an activity to become an expert at it. Professional athletes, comedians and writers talk about this all the time, and I try to write for at least a couple of hours everyday because I want to be an expert at writing.

Until today, I never considered becoming an expert in prayer. I have wanted to pray. I have wanted to talk to God and to hear from God, but it never occurred to me that I might get better at those things, that I could become an expert in prayer. Prayer is not something you produce, like a poem, and it is not something you can perform, like a pass in a football game. It feels a little irreverent to say that we should practice at prayer, but, like writing, practicing the act is the same as performing it. The only way to get better at writing is to write, and the only way to get better at praying is to pray. There are no drills. But if God created us so that it takes practice and commitment and determination to become good at writing poetry and shooting baskets and even talking to girls, then it makes sense that it takes practice to become a prayer expert. It takes time. It might even take 10,000 hours. It will be the best-spent 10,000 hours of my life.