A couple years ago, I bought myself a simple toolset for learning lock picking. It was lots of fun to learn, and I quickly mastered the practice lock that came with the kit. After that, I bought a couple of locks from a yard sale so that I could practice picking on real locks.

These were more difficult to pick than the practice lock. With one particular lock, I would spend an hour trying to pick it and only pick it once. And when I did pick it, I would have no idea what I did that made it work.

Fast forward to a couple days ago. A teenage girl at church, we'll call her Sage, told me that she wanted to learn lock picking, so I offered to teach her what I knew. I grabbed my lock picks and the practice lock from my bag and showed her how to do it.

Sage struggled to get it at first. She had a hard time aligning the pick with the pins, and she sometimes moved the pick side to side, rather than up and down. However, after about 15 minutes of coaching, she was able to unlock it consistently. That got her excited!

After that, Sage wanted to try picking other locks. The only other lock that I had on hand was the lock that I'd struggled with, so I offered to let her pick that one. However, I warned her that the practice lock was intended to be picked, while the lock I was giving her was not. So the new one might be more difficult for her.

Then, to my surprise, Sage picked that lock in 30 seconds! I thought to myself that maybe I'd accidentally left the lock unlocked from a previous time. There was no way she'd figured it out that fast.

And then she picked it three more times in the next 5 minutes! Apparently, it was not a fluke, Sage had just figured out in 30 seconds a lock that I struggled with for hours. When I expressed my surprise, she gave it back to me to try, but I still couldn't pick it. I had no idea what she is doing to get it to work.

I end up leaving without figuring it out, but I ran into her a couple days later. She wanted to try picking it again, just to make sure she could actually do it. She picked it a couple more times, and once, she mentioned "Oh, I almost missed the back spring!" When she said that, I realized that I had completely ignored a divot in the back of the lock! I had thought that it didn't contain anything significant, since I couldn't really feel or hear anything back there.

Sure enough, when I tried picking the lock again, I was able to get it open! I was quite excited about it, and Sage and I had a 10-second party right then and there. It was really cool! Sage got to walk away having learned lock picking and feeling successful in being able to figure out hard things, and I got to walk away having learned something new, too!

One reason that I share this story is that it's kind of funny. I go to teach Sage lock picking, which I've been practicing on and off for the last couple of years. She learns quickly, then proceeds to pick a lock that I've struggled with for a while. I got shown up by my own student!

But the bigger reason is that this is what I envision a healthy community to be. Everyone is willing to share what they've learned, everyone is willing to learn from others, and everyone grows together. It doesn't matter who is better or who has the most skills. The end goal is that everyone has developed the skills they want to develop.

I think it can be easy sometimes to let our pride get in the way of that. Sometimes, people get frustrated that someone less skilled than them succeeds at something that they themselves have been struggling to do. The instinctual reaction is to ignore the accomplishment, minimize it, or even put it down.

However, I think healthy communities will grow more when each individual is trying to lift everyone in the community higher, rather than just being the highest one in the community. When we are all looking for opportunities to build each other up rather than tear each other down, the whole community improves.

And this story demonstrates my favorite part about being in a community where everyone is lifting each other: sometimes when you lift someone else higher, they can in turn lift you a bit higher, too!