When I was 35 years old, I relocated from St Louis to work at a church in Los Angeles. Although I was in decent shape and worked out regularly (but not consistently), the rigorous demands of my new position and its bruising schedule soon exacted their toll. I experienced a level of fatigue that finally forced me reevaluate my habits. After consulting with a mentor, he recommended that I change my eating habits and start swimming.

Because I was reluctant to end my secret love affair with Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles, I decided take swimming lessons first—assuming that was the easier of the two recommendations to implement. Well, I was I wrong. Seriously wrong. Profoundly wrong. All the way wrong. LOL.

Taking swimming lessons was not only incredibly challenging, but incredibly humiliating. It was challenging because I was scared of the water. My fear of water stemmed from two traumatic experiences: the time I almost drowned at a pool party when I was 12 because I jumped in the pool trying to impress Laurie Wade; and then the time I was water skiing in the Atlantic Ocean during a trip to the Bahamas and one of my ski’s flew off. Although I survived both experiences, my confidence didn’t. Both of those memories haunted me. But taking swimming lessons was not only challenging. It was also humiliating. When I enrolled in the class, I didn’t know that my classmates would be young children. So there I was, with my 35 year old self, in the pool with 3 year old Jace and 5 year old Hudson. I felt like a complete idiot.

But I persevered. And not only did I learn how to swim, but I learned quite a few lessons about life and about myself. Chief among the life lessons was an observation that my instructor repeatedly made. He would say that he preferred to teach children rather than adults. He said that teaching adults was so difficult because a) we think we know it all; b) we always want to challenge the teacher, and c) we have to unlearn what we think we know so we can learn what we need to know. The old English proverbs is true: unlearning is more difficult than learning.

I thought about that proverb when I came across this statement about Moses, one of the greatest men of not just biblical, but all of human history. Acts 7:22 says:

And Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, and was mighty in words and deeds.

To say that Moses was “learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians” is quite a compliment. Consider that the pyramids of Egypt were built over 5000 years ago and are still standing. They are marvels of engineering. Contemporary scientists, archeologists, and historians still can’t explain nor comprehend how such a “primitive culture” could produced such an advanced structure. Well, the culture that produced the pyramids is the culture that produced Moses. To be learned “in all the wisdom of the Egyptians” means that Moses was quite learned indeed.

But in order to be used by God, Moses had to unlearn everything that he had learned in Egypt. It was only after 40 years of toiling on the backside of the desert that Moses heard the voice of God in the burning bush. Moses learned a lot in Egypt. But he didn’t learn about God there. That lesson came later. After a failure. When he was in the wilderness. Alone.

I believe that God orchestrates seasons in our lives to help us “unlearn” whatever is hindering our purpose. It takes some time for us to realize that in order to be truly successful, we must do things God’s way. And God’s ways, as the prophet Isaiah reminded us centuries ago, are not our ways. Paul takes this idea further in 1 Corinthians 3;19, when he writes that the “wisdom of the world is foolishness with God.” From a divine perspective, so much of what we learned in our families and from our culture that masquerades as wisdom is folly. To walk with, be used by, or comprehend what God is up to in our lives requires us to go through a thorough process of unlearning.

But however challenging or humiliating the process of unlearning may be, stick with it. Your future will thank you.