Black Women Have It Going On

Monday, September 21, 2026

Good morning from Colorado! There is a saying I learned during college that has stayed with me over the years: “The teacher will appear when the student is ready to learn.” I don’t remember who first said it, but the older I get, the more I understand why those words have stayed with me.

When I first heard the statement, I probably thought about a traditional teacher standing in front of a classroom. Someone with knowledge, a lesson plan, and students sitting in desks waiting to be taught. But life has taught me that some of our greatest teachers never stand behind a podium, and some of our most important lessons never come with a textbook.

Sometimes the lesson comes through a person. Sometimes it comes through an experience. Sometimes it comes through a mistake we wish we hadn’t made. And sometimes the lesson has been sitting right in front of us for years, but we weren’t ready to understand it.

That’s the part of the saying that really speaks to me now.

The teacher can be present before the student is ready.

Think about that for a moment. A person can have wisdom to share with us, but if we’re convinced that we already know everything, we may never hear what they’re saying. Someone can offer guidance, but our pride can interpret it as criticism. Someone can share an experience that could help us avoid a mistake, but we can become so busy defending ourselves that we never hear the warning.

The problem isn’t always a lack of teachers.

Sometimes the problem is a lack of teachability.

And teachability isn’t the same thing as being uninformed. In fact, I’ve come to believe that some of the most difficult people to teach are not people who know nothing. They are people who know enough to believe they don’t need to learn anything else.

Life can do that to us.

We gain experience. We accomplish things. We survive difficult seasons. We develop opinions based on what we’ve seen and lived through. Before long, what began as experience can become certainty, and certainty can make us stop listening.

But there is another way to live.

We can remain curious.

We can listen without immediately preparing our response. We can admit that someone else may know something we don’t. We can be willing to reconsider an idea without feeling as though we’ve somehow lost.

I think that’s one of the reasons growing older can be such a beautiful experience. If we allow it, age doesn’t have to make us harder. It can make us more aware of how much we still have to learn.

And perhaps that is where God enters this conversation.

I don’t believe God stops teaching us because we have reached a certain age or because we’ve already walked through a few difficult seasons. If anything, our experiences can prepare us to understand lessons that we simply weren’t ready to receive before.

There are things I understand today that I couldn’t have understood twenty years ago. There are things I once dismissed that now make perfect sense. There are lessons I thought belonged to somebody else that I eventually discovered were meant for me.

Maybe the teacher had already appeared.

Maybe I simply wasn’t ready to be the student.

That thought makes me want to pay closer attention.

Because if God is still teaching me, I don’t want to become so familiar with life, people, or even my own experiences that I miss the lesson.

I want to remain a student.

Scripture

Proverbs 1:5 (KJV)

“A wise man will hear, and will increase learning.”

I love the simplicity of that verse. Wisdom doesn’t tell us that we’ve arrived. Wisdom keeps us listening.

And maybe that’s where we should begin this week—not by asking who is qualified to teach us, but by asking whether we are still willing to learn.

I’ll see you tomorrow for another 15 Minutes with God.