Personality

Between my own personal growth, seminary requirements, and other professional training that I have been through, I have had to do a number of psychological and personality assessments.  There are some people who find these incredibly helpful while other think that they are a sham.  Having seen their influence in my own life and their helpfulness in viewing others around me, I would find myself in the first group.  While they are certainly not to be taken as “gospel” and the end-all-be-all of self-understanding, I have always found them helpful.

If you have never taken any personality profiles or assessments, I would encourage you to do so.  Personally, I have taken the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator multiple times, StrengthsFinders a number of times, as well as various others like the PI and others.  A week before my wife and I were married, nearly 12 years ago, we went through a seminar and workshop that involved both the Myer-Briggs and the StrengthFinders assessments.  It seems like a day does not go by where we make reference to it with ourselves or with others with whom we interact.  If nothing else, they have been an incredibly helpful tool for us to understand each other.

A brief example to contextualize this is in order.  My wife is a fairly strong “P” in the MBTI (Myers-Briggs - Perceiving) while I have generally been a strong “J” (Judging).  One of the strongest examples of this to make it understandable is that, as a J, I need closure.  I can’t leave a lot of things left open and undone or it will frustrate me.  If I lose something, I need to find it “right now.”  If it’s midnight and something is unfound, I will search high and low for it.  As a P, my wife can be a lot more free about things like this than I can.  If she loses something, she just figures that it will turn up.

In nearly 12 years of marriage, we’ve both come to understand the other enough that the difference has caused us to be more compromising and complementary to each other (at least I think so).  Case in point was last night, my wife brought our middle child to a birthday party and when we met up later on, she was unable to find her phone.  She didn’t seem too disturbed by the fact that she couldn’t locate it while I was ready to go out and tear the car apart to see if it turned up.  My wife, in all her graciousness, asked me if I wanted her to go outside (in the dark) and look for the phone in the car.  I told her that we could wait until morning.

This morning, I called the place where the birthday party was to see whether someone had turned in a phone.  I was ready to drive by the parking lot to see if I saw anything on the ground.  My wife just continued to go about her other responsibilities.  While I was on my way to search the parking lot, my phone rang and I saw that it was my wife’s cell phone.  I answered and she told me that she had found it in the diaper bag, which she hadn’t even had with her.  Scratching my head, I realized that I had thought to look there last night, but it seemed illogical that it would be there.  Just goes to show me that I need to go with my gut.

Anyway, I guess I can chalk another one up for the P’s of the world.  Getting frustrated about a lost item has never really benefitted me while my wife’s patience will probably help her live longer.  All this to say, at the end of the day, I think we understand each other better.  In psychological terms, we do our best to be self-actualized.  Today will come and go and there will be more days ahead of lost things, my wife and I will continually to be different people, but we can better understand each other when we see how God knit and formed us together.  Like I said, these profiles and assessments have been helpful to me and my wife.  If you haven’t taken any before, I encourage you to check them out, I would be surprised if they didn’t help you in some way or another to understand yourself and those around you as well.

Looking Good on the Outside

I posted a blog about ironing on Monday and this post follows a similar theme.  It's interesting to me how we can sometimes change things on the outside and expect that it really makes a difference to the inside.  It's kind of like "My Fair Lady," where a disheveled and common girl is turned into a proper lady by Professor Henry Higgins.  But the fact of the matter is, unless something changes on the inside, it's just behavior management on the outside.

I was reminded of this when my family was on vacation and we visited another church.  From the outside, everything looked great.  In fact, I may have even been a little envious of the facility that they had.  The worship space was great.  They had state-of-the-art equipment.  They had a nice little cafe out in the foyer where people could watch the service on flat screen televisions.  It seemed like they had all of the pieces to make everything work well.

But good equipment and fancy stuff doesn't necessarily change things.  You can dress things up, but it doesn't always cover over the fact of who or what someone or something really is.  At the end of the day, it felt like there was a lot of "cool" stuff but not a whole lot of depth.

I am sure that the people at the church are nice people.  I expect they love God and enjoy serving Him.  But the experience was really just a reminder to me that you can get everything "right" on the outside and if you don't let God do the difficult work on your heart, it's all for naught.  I can pretend to be something that I'm not, but eventually, the pretending will be too hard for me to handle. 

I don't really think that it's a matter of keep trying to look different and eventually you will act different.  I believe that the only way that we can change is through the transforming power of the Holy Spirit.  I can do my best to make all the changes that I think I can, but I really don't think that they will last.

One of my favorite passages of Scripture is 1 Samuel 16.  The Lord sends Samuel to anoint David as the new king and he looks at David's brother and thought, "This guy must be the future king, the Lord's choice for Israel."  Instead, we read in verse 7, God says to Samuel, "Do not consider his appearance or his height, for I have rejected him. The Lord does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart."

It's easy to get caught up with how things look on the outside, but we need to remember that it's what's inside that matters most.  Behavior management is one thing, a changed heart is something completely different.  May my heart be changed.

Let the Conversations Begin...

As expected, after my blogpost on Chick-Fil-A, there are some people who understand me better, some people who feel the same, some people who still dislike me, and others who just completely misunderstand where I am coming from.  I think that's pretty much gonna be the case for most of my life.  While I consider myself a fairly good communicator, I completely understand that each and every one of us looks at the world through our own lens, colored by experience and belief.  That lens often has a way of changing our viewpoint simply because of the nature of experience and belief.  I feel like my goal is to do the best that I can to allow my lens to be as objective as possible.  Not that experience and belief don't shape how I see, but I want to be able to be open to at the very least understand where someone else is coming from.

My wife received a message from a friend who seemed curious and even concerned with how we might perceive her had we known that she ate at Chick-Fil-A on Wednesday.  My heart sank when my wife told me about it because I hate to be misunderstood and I felt like that may have been the case.  But it's been stuck in my head ever since my wife shared it with me and I just keep rolling it over in my head, wondering how it is that we got here.

My week seems to have been full of short and long conversations with people who are ideologically different than me.  Someone questioned me the other day about some claimed differences within our denomination that they did not understand.  As I sat and listened to her wonder about what the differences may be, I also wondered to myself how many conversations had been entered into with others whose views differed.  I don't say that as an accusation at all, in fact, it's a two-way street that seems to have turned one-way.  I'm not completely sure when the "Two-Way Traffic" sign was removed and replaced with a "One Way" sign, but it happened.

I don't mean two-way traffic in a non-absolute way but rather in a conversational way.  Conversations need to be two-way streets, allowing both sides to travel along the path of conversation in hopes that they might be able to understand each other a little bit better by the end of the conversation.  I don't expect that the direction of traffic might change by the end of the conversation, but I do expect a level of education to have been achieved as both directions slow down long enough to explain to the other why they're going the way that they are going.

When we enter into conversation to try to convince people, it seems that we take an element of care, concern, and love out of the conversation.  When we enter into conversation to understand, it seems that our defenses come down and we actually seek to learn.  Frankly, I'm fairly tired of people who claim to be open-minded and yet when the sticks come down, they show through actions and sometimes words that they are open-minded to anything as long as it does not conflict with their own seemingly open-minded ideas.  I'm also tired of the idea of taking a stand in polarizing ways.

Back to this whole Chick-Fil-A thing, I think it says something about both sides that when one side stages an endorsement day of the company, the other side decides to "one-up" the other by staging a different type of endorsement day altogether.  Is this what it's come to, playground politics where I say, "I'll show you" and then I do my best to make sure that I somehow go a little further than you did.  It kind of reminds me of the scene in "A Christmas Story" when Ralphie and his friends are gathered around the flagpole in the middle of winter.  They taunt and tease each other and the competition escalates to a "Triple Dog Dare."  It's as if all that we want out of the situation, from both sides, is to "win," whatever that means.

I haven't hesitated in the past to verbalize my beliefs, but I do my best to try and understand that everyone does not see things the way that I do.  I have a strong sense within me of what's right and what's wrong, but I know that not everyone holds to those same beliefs.  I have found that it has been way more effective for me to graciously converse with people about our differences rather than simply tell them, "You're wrong and I'm right," whether I say it like that or not.

When we come out with generalizing statements, regardless of which "side" we claim to be on, there will inevitably be some who are not defined by such statements who will take exception to the categorization.  I'm fully aware that we're all guilty of this but it needs to stop.  If you are a Christian who holds to the teaching of Scripture as I do, maybe instead of toting signs and staging protests, you ought to get to know someone whose view differs.  Begin a conversation with them and find out what they believe and why they believe it.  If you enter the conversation because you legitimately care, they will appreciate it and may even give you the opportunity to explain what and why you believe what you believe.

Likewise, if you support a different view in which Scripture plays no part, maybe you can find someone who breaks the generalizations that our media loves to emphasize.  Find someone who holds a different view and who is willing to engage in a conversation with you, both of you might learn something in the process.

While I've learned a lot over the years, I still know that I've got a whole lot more to learn.  One thing that I do know is that amiable and intelligent conversations don't happen across picket and protest lines, but they do happen across coffee tables.  I might not be able to change all that, but I can certainly change what I do in hopes that others might follow suit.  At the very least, there will be a few of us who will engage in some beneficial conversations, and who knows, we might just learn something.