Confidence

Music, writing, crocheting. Gardening, canning, baking. Volleyball, reading, learning.

There are many things I enjoy doing and I have always done well at most everything I have attempted. I'm one of those who is an expert at nothing but very good at many various skills and activities. The result of this? I am a fairly confident person.

I know that with anything over which I have control, I have a good chance at success. And there you see my trouble: “anything over which I have control”.

For most of my life I have had control over all that I do. Then I became a mommy.

Suddenly I discovered that even when I read all the right books and learn all the perfect techniques, even when I master everything perfectly, my children may or may not respond as I was promised.

You may roll your eyes or shake your head at my naivety, but this truly rocked my world. My confidence had vanished.

I struggled and prayed and sought wisdom from many sources. After one particularly desperate session of prayer, though, my confidence was beautifully restored.

As much as I may have wished, God did not give me the perfect technique for parenting my little ones. My confidence in myself had nothing to do with my restoration.

Instead, God gently reminded me that He loves my girls even more than I do. Which is a lot. God wants, even more than I do, that they should love Him and love people.

And if God wants something to happen, who can stand in His way?

I still have children who refuse to respond properly to my masterful parenting techniques (which often involves stomping my foot at them), but as long as I remember God's promises, my confidence can no longer be shaken.

But blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD, whose confidence is in him. He will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit. ~ Jeremiah 17.7-8

Slinging Mashed Potatoes

My eldest has had trouble loving her sister lately.

When she gets angry, even if it is with herself, her first instinct is to lash out and hurt Little Sister. We've been working on this, trying to teach her other ways of expressing her anger, but it is a long and difficult road. She seems to lose all common sense when her emotions run high.

Sadly, this reminds me all too much of the adults in our country this time of year.

Ah, election season.

Time for everyone to lose logic and common sense and to begin slinging hateful words around like mashed potatoes in a junior high camp cafeteria.

I have been wondering how we got to this place. How did we get to the place where it seems impossible to have a compassionate discussion of ideas?

In my most recent Mars Hill Audio Journal, it was suggested that this has become part of our culture because of the direction that our public schools have taken.  When we emphasize math and science to the exclusion of teaching ethics and civics and philosophy, our citizens grow up without knowing about logic, without knowing how to follow an idea through to its logical conclusion.

Here is a clip of one of my favorite authors, N.T. Wright, speaking about the problem that we don't even have the debate but rather have bits and pieces of a shouting match (if you are viewing this via email/in a reader, click here to view this video):

 

I can see, having been a teacher myself, how cutting logic and philosophy out of schools would appeal. It is much easier to control the flow of ideas than to teach people to think for themselves. (I am not proposing that this has been a deliberate conspiracy against free thinking in our country, rather that this has been the unintended consequence of placing a higher value on sciences than humanities. It simply helps the cause that the things that are cut out are subjects that tend to make governing more difficult.)

As I thought about how we got to this place, though, and as I listened to respected leaders speak about this issue, I realized that this is not a new problem, this problem of not teaching young people to think for themselves, of not teaching children how to think logically about an idea and spot the fallacies contained within.

In the 14th century, John Wycliffe was one of the first advocates for translating the Bible from Latin, a language that only priests and rulers could read, into the common language, accessible to all. The leaders of his day violently opposed him, wanting to keep the power of ideas to themselves. Wycliffe's opponents cried out, "The jewel of the clergy has become the toy of the laity". In the end, Wycliffe was declared to be a heretic and his body was exhumed and burned, and the ashes were scattered.

As much as I would like to swell with indignation at the thought of trying to control ideas, if I am honest with myself, I can relate. It is difficult for me to trust my own children. I want to control the flow of ideas, to control what they know and understand. This would be much easier than teaching them to think critically and then dealing with the inevitable hard questions that will come.

Thankfully, I know better. God has instructed me to trust. Not other people, but Him. I must trust His Spirit inside my children.

So I will continually ask for help in relinquishing control. I will trust my girls to the care of God's Spirit and trust that He will show them what is good.

As for our country, our election season, let us be the first to use logic and common sense, to show compassion to those with whom we disagree, and trust in God's plan and His Spirit working rather than taking the easier route of slinging mashed potatoes all over their faces.

Art Credits: Vote photo by woodsy; photos of N.T. Wright and Wycliffe stained glass from Wikipedia images

Why do you seek to know?

She has control over so little in her life. Her Daddy and I tell her when to get up and when to lie down, when to eat and when to play, what to wear and where to go. She grasps at anything that will give her more power over those things with which she comes into contact.

She loves to know what name to call things, especially when that thing frightens her a little. When she was smaller, her constant response to a loud noise was "that was?". Now that she is a little older, she asks "what was that? that noise?". Knowing the name of something gives her power over it, makes it seem a little less scary.

She seeks to know.

Perhaps she is not very different from many adults.

Scientists, medical researchers, geneticists, stay-at-home moms who like to learn...people want to know what name to call things, want to know about things, because that gives them power over those things, those ideas. If we know how something was put together or how something works or even just what to call it, we feel as though we have power over our world.

We seek to know.

A long time ago, in a land far away, around the beginning of the Christian Church (perhaps even earlier), there lived a group of people we call Gnostics who believed (among other things) that matter, the material universe, was bad and that deliverance from our material form could only come through special knowledge.

Not so long ago, in a land not so far away, there lived a group of people who believed that their minds were all-powerful, that through knowledge they could overcome all physical limitations. They could eat poorly and take vitamin supplements. They could ignore their children and send them to therapists. They believed that saving our natural resources wasn't important because their minds, human ingenuity in the form of science and technology, could surely take care of that problem as well.

There is nothing new...

In C.S. Lewis' Abolition of Man (1943!), he said that mankind's power to do exactly what it wants seems to be growing all the time through humanity’s so-called “con­quest of Nature” – the progress of applied science. However, “each new power won by man is a power over man as well.” We can throw bombs from airplanes but can also be bombed ourselves; a race of birth-controllers is a race whose own birth has been controlled.

We seek to know. We seek to control.

Why do we feel that Nature is bad, that the material world needs to be conquered? Even as Christ-followers we seek knowledge because we fear. We want to know and to name so that we can control that which is uncontrollable.

Is the pursuit of knowledge wrong? If so, than my thoughts a few weeks ago were completely amiss.

As I read through Philippians again, I see this:

And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ—to the glory and praise of God. ~Philippians 1.9-11

Paul seeks to know.

I also read this:

I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do all this through him who gives me strength. ~Philippians 4.12-13

Paul is definitely not in control, nor does he seek to be.

Is this a Faustian-like power, this power of knowledge? A power that gives away everything good that God created in order to gain power and control over His creation?

It can be.

As Christ-followers, do we seek knowledge because we are fearful of the future and wish to wrest control of His creation from the One Who set it all in motion?

Sometimes I do.

Perhaps instead we can seek knowledge in order to praise God with our minds. Perhaps we can seek knowledge in gratitude for our imagination and intelligence, in gratitude for the complexity of His creation.

I suppose that, as with most that God has created, the goodness or evil of the pursuit of knowledge depends upon the heart of His creation.

May our hearts and minds seek to know out of thanksgiving rather than out of fear.

*etching is "Faust" by Rembrandt