Taste and See [for Yourselves]

For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food, for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child.
Hebrews 5:12-13

You know what I hate? I hate that this world demands evidence of every claim made by anyone, but that few actually go out to seek that evidence on their own. In our culture of instant self-gratification the "give it to me now" attitude often gets in the way of truth. This is frequently displayed in our culture, but I see it most often when I am sharing my faith with others.

It's no secret, on my blog or anywhere, that I am a Christian. This is never really a problem with anyone until I show my faith isn't only emotional, causing me to act on compassion and "do good", but also intellectual. Actually, people seem to most often have a problem with the intellectual part of Christianity.

Last week, for example, I found an image posted by an atheist friend on Facebook that depicted a timeline of how the Bible was made. The cartoon was not terribly inaccurate, many of the dates for different steps in the translation and compilation of the Bible were correct, but the motive and many of the "facts" were just completely wrong. I left a comment pointing out a specific part that wasn't right and said that the person who created it had obvious knowledge of events but was not educated in them.

Here's the deal: when I point out to people that things they believe about Christianity and the Bible are wrong and try to clarify meaning, they just don't believe me. For years I thought that they didn't believe me because I was uneducated and they thought perhaps they knew more about my faith than I did. However, I'm now seeing that even though I go to a Christian school and study the Bible, theology, and the history of Christianity, people still call BS when I try to clarify to them what true Christians believe. Now, instead of saying that I just don't know enough about what I believe, people will tell me, "that's just what they want you to think."

The past few years, this past year in particular, I have had the wonderful opportunity to learn under people who have traveled to Jerusalem and other parts of Israel to walk where Jesus walked and see the culture and the land first-hand. I have met men who have learned from the world's top theologians, and I have heard the testimony of a professor who worked hard, even lost a job, to bring the Dead Sea Scrolls to the public. The truth is out there, evidence is out there. Go look and see for yourselves!

Because the evidence is not hidden and the history is no secret, I do not apologize for my unfaltering faith. I will continue to unashamedly speak what I know, not because I merely believe what someone told me, but because I have done research. And I will continue to absorb as a sponge everything I need to know, from a historical and literary perspective, but also from one of faith in Him who makes the blind see and makes all things new.

Priorities

Today I traded in the mocha for a hot mint tea so that I could feel good about buying breakfast along with my coffee. Unfortunately, my mocha has become sort of ritual for me, telling my brain when it's time to write for the blog-world, and I'm finding that I either need to drink a mocha each time I sit down to write this blog or get myself out of the habit of drinking a mocha every time I sit down to blog. For me, this goes under the category of problems to solve another day, and I choose to make note of it and move on for now. But I couldn't help noticing that as the barista rang up my total, it was less than I normally spend on my one small mocha.

This year has really been about finding priorities. Last semester was busy and hard, and I ended up quitting one job and significantly reducing hours in another. Putting schoolwork ahead of employment is not normally the advice I would give to others, but after looking at our budget and finding that with my husband's income we would have, once again, *just enough*, I decided to spend the year focusing the majority of my energy as a student. But prioritizing isn't always easy.

I have a friend who is in a training program to become a pastor who tells me she can't do anything around the house until her homework is done (with the exception of taking care of her children when, say, they need food or a diaper change). Her husband, on the other hand, can't focus on writing a sermon or speech or making a budget until the housework is done and he can be free of distraction. They're lucky, they have it figured out. They know exactly what they need to do in order to focus and complete their tasks.

I have met students here who are killing themselves over grades. I met one girl whose philosophy is to get all of the homework done, sacrificing sleep, work, anything she can cut out of the day to get work done. She and others strive for A's and anything less is unacceptable. Of course, I can understand this, but I don't think it's any more healthy than putting everything off until the last minute and doing a minimalist job.

What I have found this year, especially after spending a year in the "real world" where you have to work hard and make a sustainable income, pay bills, etc, is that there are no A's in life. I am learning that most of the time family comes first, gainful employment is important for a sustainable lifestyle, community involvement helps more than the individual.

It's hard to find a balance in a world where everything is graded, but you can't neatly file learning, understanding, gaining of knowledge. As my colleagues and I get closer to graduation, it's harder to regurgitate exactly what the professor wants. What professors want these days is not to see how much we can remember from text books but how we apply what we learn in class to our own work, and how we develop. In the real world, we need to know how to prioritize.

Because ultimately, what we become is far more important than what we know.

Vulnerable Me

 About a week ago we discussed vulnerability in one of my writing classes. The class started with some uncomfortable shifting in seats and possibly some eye-rolls. However, it turned out well, and we had a good discussion. Maybe it's just the dynamic of a classroom setting, but most students left agreeing with the professor's main point: we must learn to be vulnerable.

While writing my short story for that same class last weekend, I was struggling with the ending. I will point out to you here that to talk about this I must make myself vulnerable. So, I was writing my short story, trying to figure out where I went with the ending because my professor didn't find the first draft believable. In the first draft, my main character finds out she is pregnant after a rare and accidental one-night stand, and decides, since she is pretty fresh out of college, to get an abortion. I just couldn't let her go through with it and had to find a way out, so I had her call the baby daddy at the prodding of her roommate to ask for some help with the decision. He, of course, is far from okay with the thought of abortion and offers to raise the child if she will only carry to term, which ultimately causes the main character to change her mind and not get an abortion.

Don't worry, I now see where the story went wrong. I think I did at first, too. But I was having a hard time really being open to taking a risk in this story. I decided that a risk had to be taken, and while I was re-working the end of the story, the end became a story of it's own, and it is now the beginning of the piece. Yup, I chucked out the whole first draft, and basically, started over. All because I was willing (finally) to become vulnerable. In allowing myself to potentially be hurt by taking a risk, I actually wrote a much better story... which would be tooting my own horn if I didn't know from the writing process that it really is a better story.

Our culture tends to think of vulnerability as synonymous with weakness. It makes sense, considering the dictionary definition: capable or susceptible to being hurt or wounded; open to moral attack, criticism, temptation (definition from dictionary.com).

Vulnerability is the main topic of Brene Brown's Ted Talks, which can be found on the Ted Talks website or on YouTube. Brene Brown studies shame for a living, and found that while dealing with shame one must become vulnerable. She is pretty inspiring and I would recommend taking the time to check out some of her speeches.

Now, we have established the definition of vulnerability, but does that make it synonymous to weakness? Yes and no, I think. If you've ever looked in a thesaurus you are aware that looking up the definitions of words is also important; not every word listed as a synonym actually has the meaning you may be looking for. So, where vulnerability is synonymous to weakness, it is not necessarily weakness.

In order to be vulnerable, you need to be willing to make yourself susceptible to weakness - to being hurt. These days we work really hard to close ourselves off and be strong so that we can't be hurt by anyone; we won't allow anyone to hurt us. But in order to be real, and according to Brene Brown in order to be truly happy and free, we need to learn to allow ourselves to be vulnerable.

Vulnerability is honesty. Openness. In being vulnerable we do open ourselves up to be hurt, but we also learn to trust that way, too. Meaningful relationships can't be built through a wall. To develop a truly strong relationship with anybody - a friend, a potential dating relationship, a therapist, even - we must be vulnerable.

In opening up we learn the freedom of trusting people, and find little pieces of ourselves on the way.