It is another example of how easy it is to misunderstand the English language when I say I might go to a practice but that doesn't necessarily mean that I will practise. Or equally difficult to comprehend that a you might visit a doctor's practice and find that he or she is practising. I mean, why do they do all that study for years and then every day all they do is practise. It doesn't exactly fill you with confidence. I can just hear myself thinking as I enter the surgery, 'How often have you practised before I came in and do you intend to practise on me?' I mean, I remember well at rugby practice, if we dropped a ball or a move went wrong, I would think to myself, 'it's only a practice,' so I hope doctor's don't think the same way!Of course the whole confusion over the two words is because the 'practise' is a verb and is all about what we actually do while 'practice' is a noun often used to indicate a sports practice or a music practice, but not restricted to just these. Unless of course you live in America where they just use the latter spelling for the verb and the noun. Anyway you'll have plenty of opportunities to practise that before I'm finished.
I have to admit I wasn't the most enthusiastic practiser in the sports world when it had to be done, though my interest was always higher when we practised with the ball than simply improving our fitness by running endlessly about the place like mad turkeys who have just heard Jingle Bells for the first time. But I do recall spending endless hours in the early seventies banging a football against the gable wall of home, often knocking off some of the pebble dash and not being the most popular in the household when if was noticed. And mostly I practised with my left foot, chipping, smashing, curling with inside, toe and outside until the ball did exactly what I wanted it to do. It was all because of a footballer called Alec Lindsay, who was left back for Liverpool at the time and who had the most perfect left foot I had ever witnessed when it came to striking a ball. HE was just poetry in motion and seemed to have the ball on a piece of string, man and ball in perfect harmony. So I practised and practised until I had as much confidence hitting a football with my left as with my right. And of course though I never went on to play soccer, the time I had spent in the back yard with the round ball became easy to transfer to the oval ball on the rugby field. On one occasion, our coach even remarked to me that he thought I was left footed because I often used it more than my right during a game.
My uncle, who loved music, once told me, when I was leaning the piano, to keep practising, because he had regretted, later in his life, giving up the instrument. Needles to say, I didn't heed his advice and now, I wish I could play the instrument with more confidence than I do. And I look at youngest son who practised long and hard and is now a joy to listen to when he sits down in front of the ivories. But I think the secret to practising is in actually wanting to achieve something, to having that drive to master an ability you already possess or a task that you have been set. I know I persevered with the guitar through hours of painful fingertips and learning new chords and playing techniques but I also know that there is still so much to learn and I don't know whether I really have the drive to practise the way used to in my teens. I watched a pupil last week in school, who clearly will not be the world's greatest recorder player as he played a whole verse of a song with the recorder upside down and the holes on the bottom instead of the top. It took him that whole verse to realise his mistake but I guess his lack of interest is a reasonable guide to how much time he intends to devote to the instrument in the future.
Wife does a blog too. You can catch it at 365blessings.com. Yesterday she was so enthused in school because she had found some wonderful educational websites that would be ideal to use withe her class. I hadn't the heart to tell her that they had been there all the time but the encouraging thing is that every day she is now using the computer, for her blog, emails, exams, plans and websites and probably is only starting to realise that all this time she has devoted to it, is in fact practising. And it's beginning to show results. No longer is there that great dread when she reaches for the start up button and now she is actually keen to learn how to do new things. I guess while the old proverb, 'practise makes perfect' is not completely accurate there is a strong grain of truth that it points us in the right direction.
In Matthew's gospel, Jesus refers to the Pharisees by saying 'they do not practise what they preach.' The thing is if we say we belong to Him and we do not practise following His examples of purity, righteousness, love, humility and forgiveness, that lack of practise shows in our lives, especially in our attitude and relation to others and then I wonder if we really mean what we say. Jesus puts it much better when he says, 'But the one who hears my words and does not put them into practice is like a man who built a house on the ground without a foundation. The moment the torrent struck that house, it collapsed and its destruction was complete.' I guess too that if we practise those things that are alien to His example, we end up becoming experts at those instead and then it's more difficult to break the bad habits. But Paul gives us sound advice in his letter to the Philippians when he writes, 'Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things. Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me—put it into practice. And the God of peace will be with you. Like I say, practice doesn't make perfect, but it gets you closer to perfection.
