At the beginning of my college studies, in the fall of 2004 when I was a part-time community college student, I resolved to keep all of my math, science, and nursing textbooks for future review. My idea was that some day I'm going to sit down and go over all of them again, relearn whatever I had become rusty on, and reinforce whatever I needed most. I sold most of the textbooks that weren't from math, science, or nursing classes, but did keep a few others.

I remember my first few semesters, I nearly mastered all of the content in my books, or at least whatever we went over in class. I had an algebra class during my first semester at Reading Area Community College (RACC), and the instructor was very good at teaching it. Till the end of the semester, I could do just about any problem in the book with few exceptions and a reasonably low error rate. Fast forward a few years. I got burnt out as a student. Somewhere in the barrage of learning, I lost the motive to process and retain new things. I still have my stack of textbooks, and it has grown large enough to cover the top of my dresser, plus part of a book shelf, but there are few that I have mastered. My idea of mastering a subject is not necessarily getting an "A" in the class, but understanding the content well enough that upon completion you can turn around and safely teach it to another student, and also find the errors in a textbook. Yes, even textbooks have errors. They are limited to human understanding. Somewhere, in the time from the fall of 2004 till the fall of 2008, I got burnt out as a student, and wasn't really mastering any content anymore. I got in over my head, and didn't really care about what I learned or didn't learn.

That stack of books has gotten pretty big, and it's going to take a long time to go back over them. There's a lot of things that I didn't even study, and wasn't even included in some of the classes, but could be very useful in practice. If I actually stick to my resolve, it will take a long time to go back over those texts. In reality, it probably won't happen. I might refer to them ocassionally, but will probably never master all of that content. It's just simply too much. It would take years to master it all, and till then there would be a lot of new research that would outdate many of this current knowledge. A better aproach would be to try to stay aware of new research, but that is a pain because it's not as readily available or consolidated as big thick textbooks recommended by professors.

There's one Book that is better than any textbook. It is much indefinitely reliable, doesn't change every few years, it remains consolidated, is not based on mere human understanding, and doesn't leave one dissapointed. I will never master it, but will do better to learn to become subject to the things it teaches. It is flawless, and I haven't found errors in it to send back to the Author, simply because there are no errors. I am not the Authority on this Book, so it is not my position to teach it as if it had mastered it. Rather, my resolve would be better to encourage others to become students of thi s Book. The Master Teacher taught and demonstrated it to His students and left them in either wonder and amazement, or else frustration (Mark 6:1-6,) depending on whether their hearts where right. He corrected their errors (Matthew 7:9-13, & John 19:30), and left us with enough to keep us angaged in learning and living for more than the span of any man's lifetime (John 4:5-24). It never turns dry, like a textbook on nurse theorists.