Age

On my trip over Christmas, I got to talking with a few different people on the plane. And I reached a conclusion: Old people are hard to talk to because they've experienced so much tragedy. During my trip, conversations included breast cancer, unwanted moving trips, son dying from epilepsy, and family separations...in about 4 hours of conversation.

I suppose it highlights that much of life happens to us - and we're simply forced to make choices that deal with the tragedy. And for most of us, tragedy will be part of our lives. I just don't like how conversation with older strangers so easily crosses into pain that they may or may not want to talk about. Mostly I don't like it because I don't know how to respond.

Also, a significant amount of tragedy in people's lives seems to be brought about by their own mistakes. And there is less hope to offer as one gets older: Life is shorter, there are fewer big choices to make. And asking near strangers about their mistakes seems, well, in poor taste.

I suppose this problem will naturally solve itself as I age, but I'd like a faster solution.

Cage Rattling

I recently read Christianity Today's excerpt of a new book on dating. I think the title was something about undating. Anyway, I figured it was as good an excuse as any to post my favorite book on courtship/dating. (That's not necessarily high praise, as I'm not a big fan of many of the books.) Besides, people aren't leaving many comments, so I figured I needed a more controversial topic.

The author of Dating With Integrity went to Michigan State, so he can't be all bad. This book is actually one that taught me very little about dating. I'm actually not sure what I think of the author's approach to dating. However, I took away a lot about friendship from this book. John talks extensively about the idea of Christians as family, and what it means to have healthy family relationships.

Holzmann also does a nice study of many scriptural passages regarding topics such as physical contact, sex, favoritism, honor, and integrity. He presents a very straightforward application of the passages. One may not agree with his conclusions (and I think his logic could be tighter), but the book is very good for challenging me about whether my conclusions are derived from scripture and sound principles of understanding what God meant, or whether I'm letting my own wishful thinking be the primary interpreter.

My biggest complaint with the book is that he does not develop model of how people get married very well, and so while I walk away with an excellent idea of what solid healthy non-romantic friendships are intended to be, the romantic-marrying process is a bit muddy.

And yes, I've noted the irony that my favorite dating book deals very little with dating and more with friendship.

Of Truth and Tact

I've been thinking recently about tact. An acquaintance of mine recently bought a game and I got to help him try it out. The group we played with typically rates games (0-low, 10-high) after playing them. I chickened out and gave it a 7. It wasn't a horrible game, but it wasn't a great game. I just didn't have the heart to rate it any lower after being with him as he bought the game. To be fair, it wasn't a horrible game, and in the right mood, with the right people, I could enjoy myself occasionally. But in retrospect, it was probably only a 6 or 6.5 game. And at the time I was rating it, I was thinking 4 or 5.

On the flipside, I'm reminded of some of my early college writing. I got involved in doing some opinion writing, and some of my editorials were, well, naive, to be kind. One of my friends got a hold of one of the final copies of a particularly idiotic piece of mine (that didn't have my byline), skimmed it, and promptly pronounced it complete garbage - totally clueless that I had written it. I never had the heart to fill him in on his faux pas. (For the record, I'm not totally convinced my friend was wrong in his judgment regarding the quality of work.)

Somewhere between the two situations is the ability to speak truth kindly. It is good that when I tempted to speak strongly against X, I'm reminded that either they or their close friends may be heavily emotionally vested in X. But I suspect that I hedge a bit too much at key points when more directness would be healthier.

Periodically I wonder how often I unconsciously verbally destroy an ideal that is important to someone, and they merely withdraw rather than contest the point. I'm not really sure I want an answer.

[Cartoon from here]

He Who Answers Before Listening...

For the record, let me state that starting a review of my VIBs (very important books) was a bad idea, since it seems to be resulting in my being more attentive to my failings in these areas. Today's book is about listening, for example, and I've spent most of the week noticing ways that I'm really bad at actually listening to others. Sigh. I should pick happier books, like '10 Ways to Appreciate Yourself More.'

Anyway, Listening for Heaven's Sake is a book I picked up about eight years ago, and really stuck with me. I tend to think of it as technical book on the skill of listening. By technical book, I mean it is primarily informational, and thus can be used equally effectively for good or evil.

Mostly the book is a "how to listen to others" book which talks about a lot of practicals. Much of it is common sense, but it's put in a very nice logical and orderly format, which I appreciate. Actually, given how much trouble many people I know have at listening, perhaps it is not so common sense.

(For the curious, the book is done by the same people who did Rational Christian Thinking, which is another set of ideas which has significantly impacted me. I didn't exposed to the ideas in a book, though, so I'm not sure I'll cover it here. Maybe later if people bug me enough. :))

Death of a Vision

Lately I've taken to updating my "theology" library a bit. I'm pretty selective in what books I buy - I generally buy books that either deeply influence my views and behavior or present my own thoughts in an enjoyable way. For various reasons, I have not bought many been a while since I've found many good additions. But recently my church started a list of pastor favorites, so I have been reading through a few of them (it was a bit disheartening how few of their favorites I had read).

(I say "theology" because most of what I consider to be good theology books have immensely practical aspects to them, not dry and boring reflections on surface areas of pins and angels.)

Since I've been reading more recently, I'm also going to take some time and post brief discussions about influential books in my life. After that, maybe I finally write my Yoda post.

And the first book is...not a book. (Okay, so I'm doing books and other influential events.) A long long time ago, I heard a teaching on leadership by some pastor - "Dan". The core idea that I remember I call "Death of a Vision": That God almost always lets a leader's vision fail - horribly - before granting it. That the test of how we handle failure is a vital part of being a successful leader.

I remember Dan walking through the Old Testament and demonstrating leader after leader that faced significant and lengthy deaths of their dreams prior to their major successes. For example:
Abraham - Promised to be a great nation, then spent 25 years waiting for a son, then asked to sacrifice his son.
Joseph - Dreamed of being great, then 13 years in Egypt as a slave, much of it in jail.
Moses - Wanted to free his people, then 40 years in hiding
David - Anointed the future king of Israel, then 10 years on the run from Saul
Paul - Called to be a messenger to the Gentiles, then 14 years in obscurity in Arabia

I dug up my notes on the outline of the talk. Here's a few of the points that haven't stuck with me as clearly, but have definitely impacted my outlook:

Leadership is not based on position: People must choose to follow; they must see God in us. Leadership is first about gaining a vision, being gripped by a call of God. Then occurs the death of a vision because God almost always lets our vision die. Great leaders go through long dry times - think about fears, concerns, etc., etc. - yet God calls them great men.

God does this because he wants to test us - to know our humility, our heart, our motivations. The devil's purpose is to get us to compromise; God's goal is to refine us. Secondly, failure allows us to know, deeply know, that our success is God's work, not our own. If we endure failure, God gives a supernatural fulfillment to our vision. Therefore, do not compromise, do not lower your vision to match your abilities.

I didn't realize until I was rereading my notes from that teaching that was also where the speaker challenged the men to consider being pastors, and where I first started seriously thinking about the idea. (The core comment I remember was something like "If you don't have anything else to aim at, why not aim at being a pastor? If you want to be like Christ, you need tho character aspects of a pastor anyway." But that's probably another blog post.

[Photo: Abraham & Isaac]

Power (Round II)

Everywhere else, throughout society, there are fences, walls, burglar alarms, unlisted numbers, the most elaborate precautions for keeping people at a safe distance. But in marriage all of that is reversed. In marriage the walls are down, and not only do the man and woman live under the same roof, but they sleep under the same covers. Their lives are wide open, and as each studies the life of the other and attempts to make some response to it, there are no set procedures to follow, no formalities to stand on. A man and a woman face each other across the breakfast table, and somehow through a haze of crumbs and curlers and mortage payments they must encounter one another. That is the whole purpose and mandate of marriage. All sorts of other purposes have been dreamed up and millions of excuses invented for avoiding this central and indispensable task. But the fact is that marriage is grounded in nothing else but the pure wild grappling of soul with soul, no holds barred. There is no rulebook for this, no law to invoke, except the law of love.

So while marriage may present the appearance of being a highly structured, formalized, and tradition-bound institution, in fact it is the most free and raw and unpredictable of all human associations. It is the outer space of society, the wild frontier. The Mystery of Marriage by Mike Mason

I did some reading over break, and came across this quote in another book. Something by Chuck Swindoll, I think. I haven't read Mike's book, and I'm not entirely I liked the Swindoll book. It was an interesting read, but I felt like he summarized his understanding of some rather important marriage issues rather than fully explaining himself.

The Mike quote fascinated me. It caught something about the vulnerability of marriage and, to a lesser extent, of friendship in general; how often our lives are primarily defined by attempts to protect ourselves.

I'll restrain myself from offering many thoughts on marriage, but the quote got me thinking about friendship: Friendship does not work well when our goal is to defend ourselves : Defense prevents closeness.. I also don't think friendship works well when we fail to grapple with the serious failings of others : Denial also prevents genuine closeness.

I find that I'm not very good at loving others when I switch to defense - when I view them as the enemy who needs to be kept out. (I should have some witty story to share here to illustrate the point, but none seem appropriate.) But being boldly caring, being willing for our weaknesses to be exposed while speaking insightfully without demeaning isn't a small trick.

(Don't get me wrong, I think healthy boundaries - relational and otherwise - are an important and often overlooked aspect of life. But when the motivation for boundaries is protection, not love, I start to worry. And yes, sometimes love and protection go hand in hand. Very complicated. I'd better get it figured out before I become a professional counselor, eh?)

Double Standard

I appreciated this article on water on Mars. In a tribute to deductive reasoning, this post is a little different. It even has a photo. (Actually, that idea is stolen from a pastor I know who helping lead a really cool church in Los Angeles.

Read the article and see if you can guess where I am going with this line of reasoning. Here's the key points:

A pair of newly released studies have challenged the theory that a salty sea once lapped the shores of Mars' Meridiani Planum.

Now two new papers based on the same data ... suggest different explanations for the formations, and cast doubt on the idea that conditions there could have been hospitable to any sort of life.

So which of the three theories is correct? Neither McCollum nor Knauth would say that he knows for sure that he's right and the others are wrong, though each believes his theory to be the best.

"Certainly I wouldn't say at this point that they are absolutely wrong," McCollum said.

"This happened three-and-a-half billion years ago. We weren't there when it happened," Knauth said. "So we can't know what happened then, I mean we can't know for sure, and so to speak with certainty would be foolish."

Or in other words:
1. Theory for occurrence of geological formation proposed.
2. Alternate theories proposed based on same data.
3. Researchers have preferred theories, but refuse to reject alternate theories.
4. Researchers observe that occurrences 3.5 billion years ago are difficult to know with certainty.

Now, where is this sanity when it comes to the evolution / creation debate? (And no, I didn't really expect CNN to put together one of the best secular arguments I've read in a while for creationism and intelligent design. It is an appreciated spice to life.)

Honestly?

I'm back. The good news about vacation is that I have a surplus of blog ideas. Topics include marriage (again), Star Wars, weird perspectives, and evolution/intelligent design. This plethora of topics is good for when I start getting sleep deprived again. (Side note: My creativity seems to go up when I start getting caught up on my sleep. Then I start not sleeping to fulfill my creative ideas. Then I start loosing sleep. Hrm.)

At the moment, I'm mostly reflecting on someone else's (a Christian, um "Ted") talking about how he views the world around him. I really appreciate his honesty, as I think it reflects a lot of how I tend to feel if I was really honest - at least at times. I'll cling to my pride by suggesting that sometimes I'm a bit more noble.

The context was that Ted and I were talking about how he was adjusting to a recent move. We got talk talking about the difficulty of loving your neighbor, and I thought he beautifully summarized a lot of fears and realities of being a Christian interacting with non-Christians. With permission, a paraphrased version is excerpted below.

[How are you enjoying your new home?]

Culture down here is different. Being masculine seems roughly equivalent to being a jerk with no emotions except anger, which helps one drink better. Feminism is a dirty word down here. Kids get pegged into very distinctive and hurtful gender roles. You either play football or you cheerlead as a kid. Appearance is the only thing that matters if you are a girl, how good you are at football is what matters if you a boy. And I'm talking about kids that are 10 and under. The word "nigger" is still in regular usage.

I don't drink, which is the main pastime down here. (The stats are something like 1 in 3 people down here is an alcoholic.) Of course, not wanting to explain that I don't drink due to medication to every single person I run across, I've been labeled as a teetotaller.

We don't have much in common. Its hard to become friends. Our value systems, and how we think about what is important in life, what we base our lives on, are so different. If we have faith, how we view it is very different.

I'm pretty isolated. I don't make friends that easily anyhow, and I'm in a place where I don't have a lot in common with most people. The circumstance is, that the other world is so foreign that I don't feel that I could ever understand it. It's like me speaking Chinese and you speaking English, without a translator available. Mostly I spend my time trying to explain to my kids why racial slurs aren't acceptable in my classroom, even if they are acceptable everywhere else, and even if, "But there aren't any black people in here!"

I'm actually scared of having too much in common with some people down here, because, frankly, I think they are racist, ignorant, and selfish, and if I am, I don't want to know. Much like I never wanted to think that I had anything in common with the kids I perceived as being "popular" in high school. If I could envision myself as being superior, then I wouldn't ever have to face any of my faults. Not the ones I didn't want to face, anyhow, like the fact that I was rude and abrasive.

[What's your model for how God is going to change people?]

I've tended to not think of it as my job, in the big picture, anyhow. I don't have the resources to change the community. I was talking with the associate pastor at church about this problem and basically, the answer is, "love them." I'm trying to figure out how to do better, because my natural, instinctive reaction is to fight them, which doesn't help anything.

One of my students last year said something that made me laugh. I give extra credit every once in awhile on tests and quizzes for being able to name people in history or something. I told them what the clue was, and one of my kids said, "It has to be someone who is gay, black, or Jewish, because Mr. Xavier only likes people who are gay, black, or Jewish." And after the laughter died, I realized that those were the groups of people I most regularly defended in the classroom. They didn't hear me defending *them*. They heard me defending these people who they had never met, who they were insulting out of habit.

I think in order to figure out what God's model for changing these people is, I'd need to know what God wants to change in what order. But I don't generally think of myself as the one cut out to do that.

That's what I can't get past. I can't look past all of the stuff that revolts me so much...Maybe even not because its "sin" but because it flies in the face of everything I personally value, even things that aren't sin issues... the lack of value placed on education, the lack of an interest in anything happening outside of the county, the lack of a recognition that there is a bigger world out there, and it matters. Frankly, those things are more visible to me than other issues, and they are easier to look at.

I'm selfish... their salvation doesn't necessarily help me feel any more at home here, any more connected. I'd like for something to happen to help that. I'd like it if the things that I saw here looked more familiar.

Good News, Bad News

So one of the advantages of traveling is that I am I taking more time to read. Over the last couple days, I've read through most of Jeremiah (one of those long poetry books buried in the back of the Old Testament. There's probably a lot I could write about, but here's the aspect that has really caught my attention: Do I really want answers to my questions?

Here's the setup: Jeremiah spends most of his career predicting that destruction will come upon Jerusalem if they don't repent of their idolatry and sincerely follow God. Jeremiah is in constant conflict with the false prophets who are predicting peace and prosperity. Finally, after many years, Babylon comes, captures Jerusalem, burns it and drags away most of the people to captivity. In short, Jeremiah is proven right.

Babylon also leaves the poorest people to work the land, and leaves a Babylonian governor to rule the land. The governor is not the world's brightest guy, and ends up getting assassinated. The Jews still in the land are, understandably, a bit nervous that Babylon may not take kindly to the assassination and may retaliate brutally. They go to Jeremiah and ask him to inquire of the Lord whether they should stay or flee to Egypt. Jeremiah asks them if they will obey the Lord, and they assure him that yes, they will.

But when Jeremiah returns and tells them that God says to stay and that he will bless them (but if they flee, disaster will come upon them), the people accuse Jeremiah of lying to them to bring about their destruction, and flee for Egypt.

What's scary is how much of myself I see in the story. It is easy for me to promise before I have answers that yes, yes, I will obey God. But when God's answer asks me to be brave, to face a fear, to put myself at great risk, I promptly forget my eagerness to obey God. I also tend to be rather naive about my heart; about how willing I really am to be obedient.

I wonder how often I ask for God's wisdom or will in a matter, but aren't really willing to obey him regardless of the answer.