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August 06, 2008
Faith , Life : My own words
I’ve been struggling writing the next essay in my “The Mission of the Church” series. I intend it to be an explanation of the differences between The Kingdom of This World and the Kingdom of God. The problem isn’t actually producing an essay – I can generate pages of text on the subject with ease. The problem is that whenever I step back and look at what I have written I realize that I am just repeating things that I have heard or read from other people. I’m not explaining the ideas; I am repeating how other people have explained the ideas.
Now this might not seem like a problem – it would not be unusual for a blogger to simply repeat explanations heard elsewhere – but I have some deep-seated issue with doing that. Sure, I might quote a phrase that I think is particularly well turned; but it is psychologically important to me that my explanations of things be my own. I get very unsettled when I am put into a position of using someone else’s verbiage to explain something.
Having realized the source of my blockage, I started to look into myself to figure out where that little personality quirk came from, and quickly found the answer.
When I was 13, my mother took me to Bill Gothard’s “Institute for Basic Youth Conflicts” (now call the “Institute in Basic Life Principles”) – a week-long seminar on the practical application of Christian principles to real-world situations. That week had a far more profound influence on who I am than any other single week of my life. I’ve even returned to the seminar twice (one of the perquisites of having graduated from the seminar is that you are allowed to attend again for free as many times as you want.)
Not that I agreed with everything Gothard taught. Even at the age of 13, having only been a Christian for 3 years, there were points he made that I didn’t quite buy. Now, with many more years of growing in Christ, the list of issues I have with the specifics of Gothard’s teaching has grown substantially. However, underneath the specific applications which he presents in the seminar, there is a foundational layer of attitudes about things like authority, responsibility, respect, honor, and the like which remain true and very central to my identity.
Which leads me to some of what Gothard said on the last day of the seminar the first time I attended (I noticed this was not repeated when I returned to the seminar as an alumnus years later). There was no book we were given as part of the course – just a binder with pages to takes notes on. Gothard explained that what he was teaching was based on a “life notebook” he kept – his notes on all the things he had learned about life and Christianity; edited and re-edited as his understandings of things changed and grew. He told the crowd that he did not publish it in book form (which, by the way, he does now) because it was just his understanding of things, and that it was important that everyone develop their own understanding. He said that we would be tempted to immediately go tell other people about what we learned; but that we should resist doing that. He said we should all take the time to apply what we learned to our own lives, and only after we had seen these principles at work for ourselves, should we go and find our own way to express them to others – not repeating information second hand; but communicating our own first-hand experience.
Like I said – that week had more influence on who I am than any other week of my life. Even now, the idea that I should not teach something unless I have processed it through my own life first and found my own way to express it drives how I blog.
Of course, what this means is that someplace deep down I know that I really haven’t put my intellectual understanding of what it means to spread the Good News of the Kingdom of God into practice, and therefore have no way of my own to express what it means. That is perhaps the point God has been trying to get through to me. I need to go out and start doing what I know before I start to tell other people about it.
Posted by Steven at August 6, 2008 05:00 AM
Comments
I hear and understand what you are saying and I appreciate your need to filter these thoughts through your own life. That action will insure a more reasoned position and a more defensible one.
Even so, it is not for me. I have to think that we stand on each other's shoulders to get harder things done. I don't have to understand vulcanization to properly use tires on my car; I don't have to filter Green's theorem through my life to use it to calculate the area inside a closed curve; I don't have to walk a mile in a ballplayer's shoes to know that hitting a baseball is hard. In my eyes, using other people's well-turned phrases (properly attributed) when they properly express my sentiments is no different.
In each of these cases something is internalized, but I filter just enough to gain the understanding I need. If I were to take the time to experience everything myself, to organically grow my own positions, I would have little time to accomplish the things I think need accomplishing.
Posted by: janbergs ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://sighsandmusings.stevenanne.net/nav-commenters.gif)
at August 6, 2008 09:37 AM
First, I certainly acknowledge that this is a quirk of my personality.
Second, I don't know that your analogies are all appropriate. You say "I don't have to understand vulcanization to properly use tires on my car". Which is quite true; but you aren't writing a blog entry on vulcanization. I _can_ use these ideas without having a full understanding (and in fact the point is that I need to); but I (speaking for myself) can't write a blog entry on them until I do. I too can use Green's theorum in a mechanical way; but I wouldn't blog on it unless I had something to say about it from my own life.
Posted by: Steven at August 6, 2008 11:35 AM
Fair enough.
Posted by: janbergs at August 6, 2008 03:28 PM
