Teachers as students: a lesson in humility

The best law professor I ever had was a Philosopher who lectured Tort law.

He was a large, balding, animated personality. A man who was truly excited by the series of contradictions that is tort law. He created this safe space where students, who would never dare venture an opinion in other classes, could vocalize theories, muse over possible answers or troubling trends. He welcomed our comments, and was open to the possibility that our musings could influence his opinions. Even the really off the wall, not such a bright moment suggestions were examined for possible insight.

And it wasn’t just to make us feel safe and cherished. I think what made him so special was his humility. It wasn’t humility for humilities’ sake, but a real respect of us, the students, as active contributors to things of importance. Every class you felt as if he went in thinking ‘what can I learn today’. He never saw tort law as open and shut, knowledge was not static and students had something of value to contribute, despite our lower food chain status.

Space to truly learn
As students, we had a space were we got involved in thinking, rather than just being taught, a sad reality of most of our university careers. In fact more than that, we had a responsibility to think, or the class and possibly tort law, would be the lesser for it. It transformed the classroom. It was magic.

Transferable experience
Perhaps not everyone has experienced the average law lecture. Students with well highlighted books tremble at the thought of being called upon, so that the professor can laud their superior knowledge over us. But surely we are all in situations, far more often than we’d like, where we sense that whether a minister, a boss, a parent or some type of leader, does not respect us as having value to contribute. Or a question is asked that could lead to good discussion and real learning, but the conversation is quickly shut down by the person who quickly tells how it is. The person seeks merely to transfer their knowledge to us, or to ‘influence’ us as a subconscious notch in their belt, to change us as they wish.

Situation Reversed
I have to admit I write fairly fluently on this, because I’ve been in more situations than I’d like to admit, where I’m the one dishing out my experiences, or knowledge or insight into God, without truly seeking to create a space where God, or knowledge can flourish.

Henri Nouwen speaks to this brilliantly in his book ‘Reaching Out’ (Doubleday, US, 1975):

“Someone who is filled with ideas, concepts, opinions and convictions cannot be a good host. There is no inner space to listen, no openness to discover the gift of the other. It is not difficult to see how those “who know it all” can kill a conversation and prevent an interchange of ideas. Poverty of mind as a spiritual attitude is a growing willingness to recognize the incomprehensibility of the mystery of life… In short, learned ignorance makes one able to receive the word from others and the Other, with great attention.” (p 103 – 104)

Nouwen advocates for ministers, teachers and parents to cultivate a ‘learned ignorance’, to allow the student to discover knowledge, to truly learn and mature, and to allow seekers the space to discover God.

I led a small group a number of years ago, where the members were, lets say, somewhat odd. From a worldly perspective they weren’t that skilled up, their opinions often from left field, not well thought through, or just plain wrong. There was something in me that resisted just letting them talk without ‘setting them right’, that resisted actually respecting their views and asking God ‘what can I learn from them’. If I was honest with myself, I saw it as bringing myself ‘down’ to their level.

“But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.” 1 Cor 1:26-28

The girls picked up on my attitude. I think it stopped that small group from being a place of real honesty, where God really could move. And as for my well thought through opinions and insights, they bounced off them like rubber balls.

How many other situations are occurring like this? How many people have been put off the Church, and Christ, because we are so quick to tell them how wrong abortion, or homosexuality is? How many conversations are shut down because we know the answer?

I needed a good dose of humility. Frankly, it’s easier not to. False or forced humility is a pointless exercise. True humility takes time and patience, and a total reworking of how we see people, a new view of people who might seem foolish in the world’s eyes. It means listening, truly listening, and sometimes without even getting your two cents in. It’s adopting my tort lecturer’s attitude of genuine excitement about what everyone can bring to the table, no matter how unorthodox the packaging, or how weird or misguided 99% of their other views are. Only then can we, as teachers or leaders, create a space where God’s wisdom is free to truly penetrate and changes lives, starting with ours. In reality, the truth is that “What do you have that you did not receive? And if you did receive it, why do you boast as though you did not?” But for the grace of God will my life ever have true influence.

I think at the end of the year with those girls, I was the one who had learn't the most. I had come to see that each of them, no matter how odd or thick or boring or random, had some corner on something brilliant, that they had gone through different experiences, and journeyed with God in some way that I had not, and in some way that I could learn from.

Waiting in Vietnam

I expected my time in Vietnam to have its frustrations. I know the limits of this kind of work, of helping people, helping out NGOs, especially with only a three month time frame. I’ve read enough books to know this would be a culture that didn’t value efficiency like I did. And three months is not a lot of time to settle in, establish working relationships and get things done. I was prepared for that. But I wasn’t quite prepared for this.

There was a week or so of settling in, getting to grips with culture shock, the noise, the crowds, the rocket fuel strength coffee. Then work began. Ok, a few hiccups, the website they had asked us to produce turned out to already exist. No worries, we updated it and added content. There were communication difficulties over other work. I could work through those, more time drinking coffee and talking things out. There were the doubts over the long term effectiveness of what we were doing, but again such are the expected limitations with a short term stint.

Then there was the frustration of three weeks sick in bed with shingles, my tiny hotel room getting smaller by the day. And then one of the NGOs failed to come to the ball and get organized to use my husband’s and my time here, leaving us with a spare month to sit around. I didn’t expect things to be quite this quiet.

And so I find myself in week ten, waiting.

I confess, most people don’t like waiting, or delays, but I really, really don’t like waiting. I like control. My personality type likes being able to set goals and met them. Efficiently, effectively. I’m not ok with doing ‘nothing’ on an ongoing basis. I love to get things done, to achieve, to think big and go after it. I get a high from being busy and productive. I’m a product of my culture and I don’t mind one bit.

The thing is though, I’ve been waiting in some form or another for the last four years.

I graduated University with a law degree and a job at a top firm. My future was bright, albeit it turned out not to be one that I wanted. I was bored, and the next three jobs brought more of the same. I was restless and moved around, trying to find something that would fit my strengths and give me something worth working hard for. I was always waiting for something, this job to end, to move cities, to start the next job or volunteer opportunity. Frustration turned to depression and a vital fear of never achieving something of worth. You stop trying, you loose sight of what you want, you stop living in the present. You know that in the midst of it you should work out a way through, but you’re so busy with jobs you don’t like and activities to keep you sane after those 40 hours, that you don’t find the time.

This three month stint was a desperate grasp at control. Here, not dictated by the need for a pay check, I can achieve, do some good, something worth doing. Disappointment doesn’t begin to cover it. God doesn’t always meet our expectations does he? He doesn’t go along with our timetables, or provide dream jobs or drop our life direction in our laps. He works to his own timetable.

There is a tension in me that lies at the core of my anxieties – does God even have a timetable for me? Do I just relax and trust God to ‘use’ me, does he have all our steps worked out and is just biding his time? Or do I need to take initiative and push through to bring the most good to the broken world I see around me? A difficult theological question. There is no doubt that God does indeed have specific good planned for some, the Bible being a record of many of them. But for all of us? For me?

I simply don’t know, and after struggling with this question theologically for some years, am not sure I’ll ever know for sure. I do know however that one thing we can look to God for, is that “God works all things for the good of those who love him”. (Rom 8:28)

Here in Vietnam, in the space and the time I find myself forced to live with, I’ve ended up spending a lot of time talking to God. I’ve started to journal and blog, therapeutic disciplines I never quite get myself together to do. I’ve spent more time than ever in prayer over my next steps at the end of my time here. I’ve spent time reading books. I’ve reflected on the past two years I’ve spent overseas, thought over lessons to be learnt. I’ve worked through what I‘ve learnt about myself, about what I want from life. Sure, before I would think things through and through until my head hurt. But I never had time on my hands like this, to just think, to really process.

One book I’ve been reading is Henri Nouwen’s ‘Reaching Out’. At one point he gives the poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s advice to a young poet who is struggling with the question of what to do with his life, to become a poet or not:

“I want to beg you as much as I can…. to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves… Do not now seek answers which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer… “

(p 41, emphasis added)

I’m not ok with all that is unresolved in me. I want to know where I am headed, I want to know that I will achieve something worthwhile with my life. But maybe, just maybe in my enforced solitude, in my waiting, I’ve begun to be ok with letting this evolve out of me. I’ve begun to see a little worth in the waiting, and the desperate need to live fully present, even if it is not the present you want.

I think I have to approach life with initiative, pushing forward, but with one ear cocked listening for that still small voice at all times, even looking for what he has to say when things are not as you want them, and being ok with the ‘downtime’. Maybe it will be ten years or so before I work out what unique contribution I can make to the world. In the meantime I can learn to take steps towards developing my strengths, to thinking about what it should be, and most importantly to learn to live in the waiting period.

grief

Sometimes I feel as though the heaviness of this world is too much. That I couldn't bear to open another newspaper, or watch another news cast. That evil and pain is so irrevocably rampant and evidence of God thin on the ground.

Just this week my friend has had another tragic miscarriage and another friend has died. Some weeks it seems as if the deaths, the miscarriages, the depressions, the broken dreams, will drag me beneath where I can breathe. I don't want this sadness. I don't want to grieve, to have to handle this suffocating emotion. I just want life again.

And sometimes when it gets too hard, maybe there are just one too many things that have gone wrong, or you're blind sighted by some tragedy, it feels as if you fight against it, but deep down where you won't even admit to, you wonder if it wouldn't just be easier to stop fighting, to let the sadness suffocate you, to just lie down and give in to it.
Just sometimes.

How do we grieve well? How do you move through grief, when just functioning takes all you've got? I fear that I mean by that, how do I just grieve so as to move as quickly as possible from that place. Is this cowardly? It feels placed somewhere in that vein. I feel at my weakest in this place.

Grief is an inescapable part of life, but a rhythm, a stage to pass in and out of, not to become mired in. Usually I just want out or I want to give up, I don't want to process, I don't want to examine and turn over this toxic emotion. I don't want to think, to feel.

I suspect to move on we must process, we must pick up our grief and interact with it somehow. We can't sleep through it, or busy it away, we still have to live, to put one foot in front of the other. The Israelites were given 30 days to mourn the death of someone, to wail, to give in to grief. There is a place for being overwhelmed and paralysed. After the 30 days they were to start life again. We must also face up to it, not give in.

In the face of the depths of grief some people will be facing, it feels incredibly feeble to offer this, but I have found a few threads that have helped me get through things before and process...

MUSIC
I remember reading with surprise on the jacket cover of the Dave Crowder Band 'B Collision' album about how they thought music and grief had a special relationship, how music can reach out and touch your grief in a way no other medium can (to paraphrase wildly). You may or may not agree. For me I find music bypasses my head and hits home with my emotions like nothing else. Not all music, and I can't necessarily connect a thread between music that does, from classical to rock, and I don't know why, but it does. I've been in places where I'm frozen, I haven't reacted, I haven't cried, but when I hit the right track somehow I'm balling my eyes out. Processing. Sometimes it helps that the artist has been in a similar place. Other times it is just enough to remind me of the things that are worth moving on for.

ART/CREATIVITY
Creating unleashes something in us akin to sparks of life. Whether it's painting or cooking or fixing a car, creativity can generate hope. Winston Churchill, who struggled with depression throughout his life, termed his 'black dog', found that art, painting, was the only thing that could fight this.

Try it, get out a canvas or drawing pad. You may just create something beautiful, or you might seek to express the darkness you're experiencing. It's not about the end product, it's about the process.

TALK
A more common strategy that never fails to surprise me how I fight it. It always seems to feel like the last thing I want to do. I don't want to make myself vulnerable in this place, I don't want to process. But, with the right person, someone you can trust, who will listen, it unfailingly helps. It helps remind you there are people who care, that there are people who have been through similar things, and survived, that there is life after grief.

Aloneness in relationship

My personality has a melancholic edge to it. The type that often lures me away from the crowds, to a quiet place, to ponder life, to ponder meaning and my place in it. At the same time, I find myself often surprised by myself, by my lack of awareness of what really makes me tick, of what things I enjoy for the pure sake of enjoyment. I neglect balance, often focusing on efficiency and values and achievements, rather than creativity and joy and spirituality.

I am however very open about my inner workings, whether to husband, or friend or passerby. I've always been brought up with transparency and honesty as virtues. So the following passage took me a little by surprise, the idea that perhaps a careful cultivation of "inner mystery" is in line.

Henri Nouwen in 'Reaching Out', writes:

"But real openness to each other also means a real closedness, because only he who can hold a secret can safely share his knowledge. When we do not protect with great care our own inner mystery, we will never be able to form community. It is this inner mystery that attracts us to each other and allows us to establish friendship and develop lasting relationships of love. An intimate relationship between people not only asks for mutual openness but also for mutual respectful protection of each other's uniqueness." From 'Reaching Out' (US, Doubleday, 1975, p 31).

Perhaps most challenging are our intimate relationships, where we seek to grow close by sharing everything of ourselves, each confidence traded in the hopes of further intimacy. We're so desperately scared of aloneness, not just physically, but of being alone while in a relationship, of not connecting, not being real.

But upon reflection, this is surely a dangerous gamble, with so many relationships ending with one lover feeling crowded out, disliking the now perceived 'clinginess' of the other. In a popular wedding reading, Kahlil Gibran speaks to this:

"Sing and dance together and be joyous,
but let each one of you be alone.
Even as the strings of a lute are alone
though they quiver with the same music.
Stand together yet not too near together
For the pillars of the temple stand apart,
and the oak tree and the cypress
grow not in each other's shadow."

How well do I "protect with great care [my] inner mystery"? How well do I cultivate my self, apart from my husband? Apart from my family and close friendships? Yes, I take time to be alone, but why, and what is the outcome of this time?

Over the past year or so, I have spent more time than ever with my husband. Traveling has meant we often live in each other's pockets, with little opportunity to be alone. Perhaps the failure to prioritse time alone, away, drains us of our creative ability to come together and give to each other something new. To remain separate, a distinct person with distinct things to bring to the table. Of course this can never be our aim, to cultivate aloneness and uniqueness, for the sake of the another. That surely runs the risk of negating the whole purpose.

To successfully be in close relationship with someone for a lifetime, surely necessitates this cultivation of a self apart from the self that exists in relationship. Not only simply to bring something new to the relationship, but to retain your unique self, as you were meant to be, to ensure it is not lost in the expectations of others or ebb and flow of a relationship.

God's silence and vocational black holes

The way of trust is a movement into obscurity, into the undefined, into ambiguity, not into some pre-determined, clearly delineated plan for the future. The next step discloses itself only out of discernment of God acting in…. the present moment. The reality of naked trust is the life of a pilgrim who leaves what is nailed down, obvious and secure, and walks into the unknown without any rational explanation to justify the decision or guarantee the future. Why? Because God has signaled the movement and offered his presence and his promise.
(Brenan Manning, Ruthless Trust (London, UK SPCK Publishing, 2002), p13.)

As the end of the year begins to move into sight, more and more thought space is being taken up with what the next chapter holds upon our return home from traveling for the last few years. Travel has provided the perfect excuse for procrastinating answering the all important question of what exactly we will do with our lives. Both of us, yet while still not out of our twenties, have experimented with a number of career paths, from the TV industry, to law, to chefing, to the bike industry. Far from finding our niches, we’ve resorted to escapism in travel.

For the past year we have been seeking guidance from God, lightening bolts, writing in the sky, a nudge, anything really. But it’s been all rather quiet on that front.

I’m conflicted theologically on the idea of God’s guidance. Part of me desperately wants God to have a preference that he lets us know about, even just advice of some kind, after all if you want someone’s opinion on which is a better course of action, more likely to have a greater impact for good on this world which so desperately needs it, well who better to look to than the omnipotent God. On the other hand, I wonder if he is silent at this time of all, as deadlines for decisions come, because he wants us to choose. After all, the mature child most parents want to raise into adulthood, is the one who makes their own decisions without constantly running back to the parent, but decisions that are in line with the values that have been passed down to the child.

A number of options that I have been looking at don’t seem to be working out, I can’t seem to see the next step. I feel backed into a corner, with few options to pursue. One possible path that has lurked around for some time now, is not at all a sensible one, it would require retraining, more years of study (and considering six of my last nine years have been spent studying, this doesn’t recommend it), at a time when our savings are low, and my husband is also considering study, not to mention children are possibly in the not so distant future. The option doesn’t present great job security, or much control about where we would live, it seems risky, there is great potential for it to work out, to impact people, but it’s a hard road, definitely more risk in the messiness category. I’m scared too. I’ve already studied, and found one career less than a good fit and discarded it. If God pointed me towards this particular option I’m looking at, I’d be there in a flash. But as it is I just feel paralysed, desperate not to follow another dead-end career path, but not seeing another option present itself to lead me out of this place.

While God is silent, my husband and I have found ourselves in a non-english speaking country short on English bookstores, with one book to read. The book is on prayer, and has been challenging us on a number of issues, leading us to think about this decision in new ways.

One challenge, is that hard isn’t necessarily bad when you think about life in the long run, in terms of spiritual development, and your relationship with the creator. When things are hard, the way unsure, that’s when you tuck in close, cry out in prayer. This possible path, given its focus, will be harder, and also require us to spend more time thinking about this God thing, and what that means for those around us that we would work for and with.

But is this just silly, choosing reckless for recklessness’’ sake, because it is harder? Everything in me tells me this is just plain silly.

In God on Mute, Pete Greig had the following to say:

I have often experienced the smile of God due to the risks I have taken in his name. In fact, with hindsight I can see that, without exception, the biggest blessings of all my life have been the result of taking some terrifying step of faith into the unknown. (Pete Greig, God On Mute (Eastbourne, UK, Kingsway Communications Ltd, 2007), p 218.)

Risk, daring risks, confidently taken often work some kind of magic. I don’t want to romantisce this, and trust me, taking risks doesn’t sit easily with my nature. But we have one life, one choice at a time to make, that will shape the next, and the next. And ultimately all we will have is our relationship with our creator, so perhaps taking this risk, as the world would see it, is the more prudent path from this perspective.

Possibly the biggest challenge for me lies in my fear of repeated vocational failure. Somehow my confidence has become wrapped up in my achievements, my competency, and the present state of paralysis which has been with me for some time now, hasn’t exactly worked wonders on my outlook on life and perception of self. All my life I have longed, and strived to be effective, to make a difference, to impact this world for good. I’m the type of person who gets out of bed each day asking herself, what is the point of today? What am I going to do to make it worth it? In this vocational black hole, I’ve found myself stalling. I can’t answer those questions sufficiently. And this effects my confidence. I have potential, I have strengths. But what if somehow I just sort of keep stalling, and life passes me by, and I never really make my mark, never really make an impact. Is God watching me with a sort of detachment, thinking ‘if only she had made a different choice a few years ago, then her life would have had impact’.

So, I sit and I wait, listening for a whisper, a nudge, something, anything, to guide me. I weigh the risks involved in going forward regardless. I list deadlines. I talk and I journal. I struggle and work to trust the God who, while I can’t predict how he will choose to be involved in my life, is a God who cares about this decision, who desires for me to be used for good, and who is more than capable of stopping attentive children from at least going down the wrong road. And then I sit down and listen a little more, and think about how long it has been since I listened this hard, and spent this much time with my creator. And that in itself, is very very good.

swine flu and providence

The swine flu is big in the media at the moment. Some are protesting that it's a bit too big, generating a bit too much hype and fear given that from some angles this simply appears a storm in a teacup. I've read that 36,000 Americans die a year from the run of the mill flu. Flu is something we live with, so is the media just hyping this up? Why the level 5 "imminent pandemic" rating from WHO?

Working in the healthcare sector at the moment, it appears that the Government and health industry is taking this seriously. There are major concerns going on here. And if not this flu, many in this profession think it is simply a matter of time before a strain comes along that will take serious toll, be a global pandemic.

So where does God fit in all of this?

It struck me on my way home, as I warily assessed the coughing passenger beside me on the bus, that we think we're invincible. Yes there are risks associated with our first world lives, but they're calculated risks; driving a car we know the road tolls, we embrace adventure sports, we overeat and overdrink and smoke. There are risks, but we know them, and decide whether or not to take them. Such are our first world lives. We are in control, or so we think. In the third world there are risks, but we, with our money, can avoid largely avoid these. We drive large cars to protect our families, buy strong houses to protect our things, invest in health insurance to protect our health, and trust our legal system for the rest. We don't reasonably fear kidnapping or blackmail or corrupt police, we don’t fear being bombed or shot at.

But this isn't truth.

Entire civilisations before us have had the same belief in their invincibility. You just need to visit Rome to see the remnants of a civilisation that was invincible. Or think of the black plague. The short sighted assuredness such civilisations had, that 'this', everything we have known all our lives, everything that is so much more than what has gone before, couldn't possibly be destroyed, is well and alive today.

Perspective.

So, as I sit here and ponder a flu pandemic, it strikes me how fragile is this life that I view as invincible. How precious and fleeting are the things that I consider everyday and ordinary. It puts into perspective how foolish we are to believe in our, in our ‘civilisations’, invincibility. To not walk everyday with an awareness of the creator God of the universe who transcends all rises and falls of the ‘invincible’, to not live acting as if each day could be our last, before we must stand and give account for our actions. This is foolishness.

So where is God in the midst of this? I don’t believe that God promises us safety, a cotton wool blanket for any of us, good or bad or the in between. People quote things from the Bible left right and centre to the contrary – “don’t worry, God will provide, keep you safe”. But the reality is that the Bible is a book written in context, and context considered, the Bible does not at all promise us that we will not experience pain and suffering, or be miraculously kept from harm. On the contrary, it is a book that deals with the reality that we surely will.

If a pandemic ensued, so many would be outraged that God would allow their loved one to suffer, their lives to be put in danger. But look around – look at the world, third world lives are lost and put in danger every day. Life is cheap in so many countries. People are murdered, raped, robbed commonly, without even redress. Why do we subconsciously consider our lives to be worthy of different treatment? A theology which does not take the reality of life into account, is simply not an honest theology, or a thoroughly ignorant one.

A pandemic killing multitudes would be a tragedy beyond description. But in the midst, there would be God, a God of eternity, a God to whom this life is but the blink of an eye. A God who is not immune to our sufferings, who suffers with us, but is the “I Am”, a living reminder that there is more to this life, life past this life, and that there is life beyond imagination in him.