In the past sixty-seven days, I’ve heard repeated the admonition to reach out in our time of isolation to encourage others. Still learning to build healthy boundaries, I’m almost hyperaware of things that rub me wrong. And from the beginning, I found myself slightly irritated by this mantra of “encourage others.” It seemed to assume two things: 1. That Others needed encouraging and 2. That even though we were in the same situation, the encouragers didn’t need to put their own oxygen masks on before assisting the Others.
That irritation grew as I started getting encouraging messages from people. I continued monitoring my reactions, gathering a pile of puzzle pieces, not quite sure what picture they would create. Why did I feel completely encouraged when a friend I rarely text sent me a “Hey, I miss you. Hope you’re doing well” message, but I felt like a squashed bug when someone messaged me that she was praying for me and included three verses on trusting God? A message clearly designed to encourage me didn’t, while a brief chat conversation with an acquaintance about how many days I had been inside left me uplifted. Then this weekend, Brene Brown gave me the linchpin, and the puzzle pieces fit into place. Explaining the difference between sympathy and empathy, Brown uses the example of falling into a pit. Someone with sympathy stares down at you, acknowledges that you’re in a pit, and moves on. Someone with empathy see you in the pit and joins you there. Sympathy puts you in a position of weakness while assuming its own position of strength. Empathy connects you to those outside the pit which ultimately helps you out of the hole. The truly encouraging messages I’ve received are just normal connections with people--empathy. We talk at the already established closeness of the relationship. The messages have not presumed a lack in me, a need for encouragement, a struggle on my part the way that the “encouraging messages” have. Rather the messages referenced our past normal interactions or, better yet, engaged me in conversation. C. S. Lewis talks about the skeptic always seeing through things, forgetting that the point of seeing through things is to see something: we look through the window to see the garden (or, in my case, my neighbors in my isolation). The window is for looking through. In the many hours I’ve stared through my window in the past two months, I look at the window only when it needs to be cleaned. Looking at the window defeats the purpose of its windowness. I think that’s the problem with this push to encourage others. So focused on the window of encouraging, we forget its nature. We send verses to address the presumed (or projected) struggles of others without connecting with the person, who may or may not be in a deep hole. By focusing on the goal of encouraging, we miss the target. Encouragement—empathy—comes through connection. Connection comes from sharing, not wisdom from a stable position above the pit, but rather sharing yourself. Connection comes from asking sincerely “How’s it going?” and accepting the answer even if it’s not what you expected. Connection could even come from admitting your own position in the deep hole. Truly in the past sixty-seven days, the more encouraging messages I’ve gotten were “Hey, missing you on another Thursday. Hope you’re doing well.” Or better yet the continuation of an ongoing conversation, “Hey, I just finished that book you recommended. It was awesome!”
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Balance—that ever so elusive goal. I struggle with overwork and overcorrect into laziness. I accept criticism that I am too opinionated and overcorrect into having no opinions about anything. The pendulum swings from talking too much to not talking at all, from being independent to being overly dependent, from too open to too aloof. Exhausted, I glare at the gauntlet of teeter-totters and wonder why it’s so hard.
A friend suggested that the secret isn’t balance at all. It’s alignment. When working on a balance pose in yoga, I choose a mark in the room to focus on: a drishti. The fixed point doesn’t move as I bob around like a weeble-wobble. As I focus on the drishti, I become more balanced, steadier, even stable. When I aim for balance itself, I fall, but when I focus on something that never wavers, it creates alignment in me, and I become balanced. Instead of trying to hover between overwork and laziness, I could focus on the only One is permanent and unchanging. For a while, I was satisfied with my friend’s idea. Alignment sounds saner than balance. But it still leaves a remarkably heavy burden on my shoulders. And as I fail at aligning myself with Him just as much as I fail at balance, I find myself toying with another idea coalescing from many books I happened to be reading simultaneously. We all are made with different fundamental temperaments, grow up in different home cultures, and are the products of different larger cultures, so it is no wonder that parts of Scripture resonate with some of us more than others. Collin Hansen, the author of Blind Spots, says that is how we react to Christ as well. Some of us love the Christ who is compassionate; others are strengthened by His courage; others are consumed by His commission. At first, I cataloged this as another area in which I needed to seek balance, almost missing the author’s point. But then Jen Wilkin reminded me in None Like Him that I am not omniscient; my mind has limits. I cannot successfully always remember that my Messiah is both courageous and compassionate, let alone always remember also that He commissioned His followers to a great work. In Misreading the Scripture through Western Eyes, the authors remind us that for generations, reading the Scriptures was primarily a community or family activity, not the private, solitary activity it is today. That reminder nudged me to think about the community’s role in my balance or alignment. In both Blind Spots and Misreading the Scriptures, the authors encourage us to remember other ways of thinking through interacting with others. Instead of surrounding myself with only close friends who see the compassionate Western Christ, which reinforces that skew, I could engage with friends who see His courage, embrace His commission, and understand what the Scriptures look like in another culture. This idea especially reinforces Drs. Cloud and Townsend’s premise that having multiple strong relationships is key to being healthy and forming new relationships. One good friend cannot give me all the perspective missing from my view. One good friend is just as limited as I in maintaining balance and remembering the manifold wisdom of God. There’s an interesting study by Wenger on memories of couples in close relationships. Over time, in the relationship, the couple divide the labor of remembering in the same way they divide household chores, except this division is done tacitly. The result of the study demonstrated that this transactive memory “is greater than either of the individual memories.” With transactive memory, members of a group do not need to remember every detail. The husband and wife do not both need to save in their memory which cupboard the Windex is in, which road the doctor’s office is on, or the details of that funny story that eases awkward moments at dinner parties. Transactive memory is reminiscent of Paul’s analogy of the Body. As the Hands appeal to the group about a need, a way to show His love to others, the Mind considers the cost, the Mouth shares Truth, the Muscles give strength and courage. The Hands don’t carry the burden of all the great work; the Hands do what Hands do. We use that analogy when it comes to actual service at church: who should teach, who should greet, who should never help in the nursery. But what if transactive memory is how the Body is supposed to work with knowledge as well? As we come together, we each bring the part of the Scripture that resonates with us, that has become engrafted and in coming together, we remind each other of the parts we forget. We each have something to offer and something to receive. What if the answer isn’t a never-ending struggle for internal alignment or personal balance? Maybe the answer is honest, loving connection to a varied group, a Body. Alone, I will forget parts of Who He is and what He asks of me. Together, we can remember far more and do what He asks of us. Teachers, both real and fictional ones, often work to create school cultures devoid of cruel teasing. In many ways, teasing is rejection, which we try to shelter our students from. But lately, dealing with junior highers contemplating the adults they will become, I’ve been mulling over whether we threw a baby out with the bathwater when we decided that rejection and teasing were completely bad. We laud difference so much in our topsy-turvy Enlightened culture that we have stopped considering whether the differences that students are teased for are worth defending.
Take for example a student teased for enjoying books. People questioning his decision should cause him to question his decision. Are they teasing him because he reads books, or because he traps people into listening to him recount the minutiae of a complicated plot? (Sorry for doing that repeatedly, Dad.) Reading is great, but having someone challenge him about it is also good, even if just causing him to establish what role books have in his life. Or what about the student who chews with her mouth open? Sweet, “nice” classmates will merely avoid her; others might complain about having to sit across from her without explaining why they don’t want to. Both behaviors will make her feel bad in the moment, but her poor table manners can alienate her if it persists into adulthood. Having a peer teasingly say, “Gross! I don’t want to see that!” once or twice could help her see a need to improve, which could save her from more rejection. People can change these behaviors. I think that’s where we well-meaning teachers lost sight of the issue. Jordan Peterson tells of a species of bird in which the male creates art to court the female. If the female rejects the male, he will destroy his art and improve it until a female accepts him. The bird doesn’t give up after one attempt; the bird doesn’t pout, defend his art, or call everyone else haters. He accepts the rejection and improves because of it. (This process of giving feedback to produce improved work is something we teachers are trained for, incidentally.) Students teasing others about things that they cannot change is wrong; students teasing others about things that they can change is an opportunity for growth, just like the bird’s art getting rejected, just a student getting a low score on a quiz. We could brush the rejection aside and assure the teased student that he is better than the bullies. Or we could talk with all students involved about why one group thinks the behavior is teasable and whether the teased student thinks that behavior is worth keeping in the face of rejection. If it is worth keeping, the discussion will encourage him and may challenge naysayers’ thinking. Last week, my roommate told me about her evening, which gave me a hint to my students’ future. She had gone to a party where a mutual friend tried to set her with a friend. As we hashed out the night, I asked, “Do you think you’ll see this—wait, is he a man or a boy-man?” Perhaps an odd question unless you, like my roommate and I, are a woman who has dated in the adultescence era. Even though the guy in question was a man, the question prompted a continuation of an earlier conversation: why are women just supposed to accept that many guys don’t become men until they are married with kids? Every church I have ever attended has a men’s group. Do they really just talk about the Bible and never apply it to practical moments of telling the boy-men how to become men? Do the older men really never come alongside the younger men and guide them into socially appropriate interaction? And if not, why aren’t they? Students check each other’s behavior through teasing. Adults seem less sure about how to address social ineptness. Most often, we ignore it, avoid the person, or complain about it to another person. A truly brazen person might tease the socially awkward person, but then reduce the truth by claiming it’s just a joke. A student doing something not normal in that social setting will have someone ask, “What are you doing? with the subtext of “That’s weird. Are you sure you want to do that?” I don’t think adults should behave like students, but I wonder what we are missing that we have so many stuck in adultescence. I remember my mother when, as a child, I hovered on the edges of her conversations, telling me to go away. She taught me that my behavior was not polite: either join the conversation or leave, but don’t stand there creepily watching others have a conversation. It’s easy to do that with your child; it’s hard to do that with a peer. But unless we step up and kindly say, “That’s not okay; try this instead,” they won’t have opportunity to learn. They aren’t learning from rejection. And unless we guide our students through teasing and rejection, they will become the socially awkward of the future. The man was desperate and cried out to the Teacher, “Lord, I believe.” And in honesty, he added, “Help my unbelief.” I memorized those words over twenty years ago, and they resonate with me even more now than they did then.
So often my inner cynic doubts the value of what I do. As a teacher, I sometimes have only a semester with students. I feel like I teach so little course material in that time, let alone add anything positive about how to be human. Sometimes my heart hums with pride when I read a student’s essay and marvel at how far she has come. Then that cynic reminds me that before ever joining my class, that student already had an aptitude for writing and would have made progress with any teacher she had. At times, I find that thought comforting as the weight of my students’ success no longer bears down on my solitary shoulders. At other times, I’m left thinking, “Does it matter?” Even more disheartening is volunteer work. I’ve worked at camps many summers. I love summer camp. (One of my friends who recognizes my tendency to withdraw was surprised by my enthusiasm for summer camp, but yes, this withdrawal-prone introvert loves summer camp.) This last summer, I volunteered at a camp specifically for children who live in orphanages. The camp gives them a week of fun and love, urging the volunteers to advocate later for the children’s adoption. At the end of the week, it’s heart-breaking to put the kids back on a bus and send them back to a hopeless future (because in their country, they legitimately do not have a future). It’s easy to think, “Does it matter?” Does five days of camp really make a difference? I felt like Longfellow in his bleakest of Christmas lyrics, written from the brink despair. But then, he heard the bells ringing hope: “God is not dead; nor doth He sleep.” No bells pealing jolted me from my doubt, but sweet memories did. I had stable, loving parents, who also had stable, loving parents, who also had stable, loving parents. My teachers at both school and church were encouraging and invested in me. Growing up, I went to camp for only five days every summer. And twenty years later, I still remember people from camp, who, for a couple days or even a couple hours, took time to care for me. I remember guest lecturers in university, chapel speakers, regular customers at Donut World who brightened ten minutes of my Saturday morning shift. These precious memories are not of grand sacrificial acts. They are small, routine even. But do they matter? Yes. Most definitely yes. |
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