Present and Communication Methods

This was originally written in 2014...

I have spent the last year struggling to be more present with those around me. I realized that our many modes of communication are not equal in "Presentness." I developed another goal to use the mode of conversation that allowed me to be most present at that moment.

There are three main modes of communication listed from most "Presentness" to the least:

Face to face

Voice to voice

Screen to screen

Within face to face, there are options.  There is nothing like sitting one on one looking into the eyes of those you are talking to. Almost as good, our technological age allows us to be face to face using video conferencing. Face to face allows you see facial expressions, body language, and hear tone.

When face to face is not possible, voice to voice is the next best option. Generally, voice to voice means a phone call. Phone calls allow you to hear people's words and tone.

When voice to voice is not possible

Face to Face

In person

Video Conference

Voice to Voice

Screen to Screen

Email

Text

How to be More Present

I wrote this in 2014. It looks like I still have a lot of work to do...

Being present with those around you is first a commitment and then it is a skill. I was committed to being present at the beginning of this year, but the skills were definitely in their infancy. 

As I journeyed down the "being present" path I began to develop my skills and found a number of guidelines to help me. 

I find that conversations are better when my phone, computer, tablet, google glasses, and even my palm pilot are out of my sight. Even if I remain committed to not interacting with them, they distract me from the human in the room. 

I moved my desk as far back as possible so that I could fit some chairs in the office. When someone comes in to talk to me, I stand up, walk all the way around the desk and sit down face to face and we talk. 

When my phone is in my pocket, I can not check it when it rings if I am talking to someone else. It sets up a scenario where I must judge between the relative value of the person in the room compared to the person on the phone. 

If I am expecting an important call I can not turn away, I set that expectation when starting  a conversation. 

I try to never take technology to bed with me.  The temptation to ignore my wife during those last few precious  moments of the day is too great. 

What I have not done is create technology free times every day. Someday I hope we can all shelve our technology before dinner and not pick it up until the next morning. But I have not figured out the logistics of that yet. 

Being present with humans in this world is hard and not getting easier because the distractions are getting more powerful. I challenge you to buck the trend and start a journey toward being more present. My life is richer for it and I know yours will be also. 

The Fortress Door

This was written by my friend Mike Tyler-

Gigantic oak doors overlaid with metal. Menacing looking door-knockers. Crossbows and crossed- axes hanging on the walls. All of these are typical sights in the many castles and fortresses of Germany. And to be honest, they might as well be on the doors of many of the family homes too. Their message is pretty clear - keep out unless you’re invited. These big doors often open slowly. And they’re opened by cautious people. But it is so often simple prayer, and simple questions which so easily break through those trust barriers.

Our church meets in an office complex which includes several firms, a post office, and a daycare. Which means I have regular opportunities to connect with people who are not a part of our church, without ever leaving our church building. Conrad is an employee of one of the firms in the building. I’ve seen him on and off for the past 16 months, and never received much more than a head-nod. I heard last week that he had a bit of a family crisis; his wife has broken her leg and can’t move it for 8 weeks. Usually he’s on the road for work 3-4 nights per week. But his company has been merciful and is keeping him close to home for the time being. So that means he’s around our building a lot more. Simply mentioning to him that I had heard about his wife, was like receiving the secret password to the fortress. It simply meant, I noticed him; I cared. And apparently that meant a lot. Suddenly he’s calling me by my first-name. He’s reaching out for a hand shake in the mornings. He smiles when he sees me, and wants to chat. The defenses are down. I’m no longer a threat. I’ve always believing in earning the right to be heard. And that’s not a right we can fight for. People can attack a fortress from the outside. But to change the culture of what happens inside a castle, you have to be invited in. And I’m thankful for the invitation. 

When we Credit God for Everything Good and Nothing Bad

Preface

I love Jesus. Most of the time I like Jesus. I am learning to love the church again. I am allowing myself to ask questions I never asked before. I don't ask because I want to degrade Jesus, but because I think He is strong enough for my questions. These are thoughts as I continue my faith journey from deconstruction to reconstruction and beyond…

Prayer

God, I have noticed that we often say, "God is Good all the time, and all the time God is Good." Honestly this confuses me because there is a lot that happens to me and others that is really not good at all. Are we pretending? Are we lying to ourselves? Are we confused about the definition of good? Please help me understand you better. Thanks, Tom

Musings

 I follow Jesus, and I think we Christians are pretty funny. One funny thing we believe is:

• Any time something good happens, God gets all the credit.
• Any time something bad happens, we never blame God

It’s a pretty fine deal God has with us. I am pretty jealous because I have been trying to work the same deal with family for many years. Similarly we love to over emphasize the silver lining. If someone gets their leg run over the right thing to say is, “Praise Jesus it was only one leg!”  careful not to blame Jesus for failing to protect their hurt leg.  This is a form of confirmation bias, which causes us to notice that which supports our pre existing beliefs and ignores that which challenges. When we credit God for everything good and blame him for nothing bad, we imagine it’s easy to love, serve, and respect God.

As Christian’s we learn to keep on praying for things we need.  God has his prerogative to answer when and if he wants. However, we Christians selectively report the positive results and not the negative giving the appearance that God answers prayers beneficially more often than actual.

So what’s the problem with all this? The problem is that it sets people up for a fall and it harms our ability to show Jesus to others.

Church is a place that is most comfortable for those getting their prayers answered. Those without praise reports to give can  eventually fade away, feeling out of place thinking they are the only ones not receiving Gods help. This attrition gives a false sense in the remaining church that everyone is getting their prayers answered.

Let’s use social media as a metaphor to investigate this. One of the significant factors in teenage depression is their tendency to compare their life to the lives of their friends as presented on social media. Of course the friends post the best parts of their lives rather than the challenges. Other kids compare their actual lives to the “perfect” lives of others leading to depression. When the Christian community does the same thing by presenting that God is always good and always answering their prayers, other Christians compare themselves to those people “God loves best”. No one wants to be God’s red haired step child but people can feel that way. Eventually those feelings can cause people to walk away from the faith completely frustrated by the bait and switch.  In church one of the favorites things for pastors to do is to ask each person to turn to their neighbor and tell them the good thing God is doing in their life. I have had that happen when I did  feel like God was doing anything good in my life at the time. But I put on a smile and provided a trite phrase that would get me out of a sticky situation; while inside though I had abandoned authenticity.

When we abandon authenticity, we can not engender the trust of others outside the church. If we can not be trusted, we will never be spreading any good news. So if we care about people outside the church and about Jesus reputation, we need to change our ways.

We should commit to an authentic relationship with Jesus that rejoices and laments with equal energy. This should be true in our private life and our public life. Let us as a community get away from the unwritten rule that we should always be rejoicing and create an authentic community that tells the truth, one that others outside would like to be a part of.

Experiences versus the Bible

Preface

I love Jesus. Most of the time I like Jesus. I am learning to love the church again. I am allowing myself to ask questions I never asked before. I don't ask because I want to degrade Jesus, but because I think He is strong enough for my questions. These are thoughts as I continue my faith journey from deconstruction to reconstruction and beyond…

Prayer

God. I was always taught to ignore my experience and that the Bible had preeminence over my experiences. So I always accepted this as truth. But then I realized we did accept experiences that supported faith. Honestly, this seems illogical to accept experiences as appropriate to support faith and discount them when they did not support faith. Of course should I really apply logic to faith? Can you give me some insight here please. Thanks, Tom

Musings

Christianity has an odd relationship with experience. We live in the natural world and the vast majority of our interactions are with natural life. Yet we believe in an alternate dimension, the spiritual world. As we understand it the spiritual world is described by our Bible and there is little argument here. We also maintain that the natural world is described by the Bible wherever the Bible chooses to comment on it. Here is where we find conflict and confusion.

There are two separate ideas birthed from these paradigms.

• When evaluating experience which conflicts with the teaching of the Bible, the Bible should be considered authoritative and the experience disregarded.
• When evaluating experience which supports the teaching of the Bible, that experience should be memorialized in order to increase our faith.

I never allowed myself to  question this potential inconsistency, but in recent months my resistance to this question has broken down.  It seems that what we experience in this world should always be valid or never valid.

I don’t love the never valid idea. Obviously the things we experience are real. That leaves me with experience always being a valid way to  help us understand our relationship with God. Of course we can always evaluate experience in light of the Biblical teaching, we don’t have to give that up. We just stop covering our eyes and plugging our ears pretending we did not experience something.

Embracing all our experiences, good and bad, will lead us to a more healthy place and as a bonus will be better for those outside the church. If God is in fact who we think He is, He is tough enough to deal with all the experiences we have. If we acknowledge all our experiences, we can leave behind a life marked with cognitive dissonance. People outside the church look at the church with disdain when we argue for Jesus by ignoring experiences and facts rather than doing the hard work of discovering truth. Therefore, Christians should embrace all our experiences for our sake and that of the world.

How in the World Could we all be Following the Same Jesus?

Preface

I love Jesus. Most of the time I like Jesus. I am learning to love the church again. I am allowing myself to ask questions I never asked before. I don't ask because I want to degrade Jesus, but because I think He is strong enough for my questions. These are thoughts as I continue my faith journey from deconstruction to reconstruction and beyond…

Prayer

God. It gets so confusing to see people that are Christians but act and believe so differently than me. It seems like we should be more consistent. Honestly, I feel like you did not do a very good job of vision casting for your people. I understand this because I run an business and it is always a struggle to keep everyone on the same page. But, You being God, I thought you would have a better handle on this.

Musings

We received a text from someone today. There have been enough of them that we know how it works. First we receive the message. Next we laugh and laugh at the joke, and slap each other on the back. Then someone says, “Hey guys they actually believe what they wrote. It wasn’t a joke.” Someone else says, “Nah no way!” Then it sets in that they really do believe what they said. We feel so very sad suddenly. Silence falls across the room, and we ask the question, “How in the world could we all be following the same Jesus?”

Of course this question has been asked for generations. I’m not an authority; I may be mostly right or mostly wrong, nonetheless here is my theory. There are two critical aspects of American Christianity, diversity and hyper individualism, which lead to a three step progression. It begins with "picking and choosing", progresses to confirmation, and ends with certainty issues.

The two critical aspects are the diversity within the Bible and the hyper individualism of the Church which began with the protestant revolution.

The Bible is a complicated book. It does not didactically teach us the right way to live. It illustrates the journey that ancient peoples took to get to know and follow God. At times it is prescriptive, showing us the way, and sometimes simply descriptive. Telling the difference can be challenging. Sometimes it is unclear what about a situation made a certain path correct, making it hard for us to apply truth to our lives. Within the story are conflicting emotions and actions. We see anger and peace. We see grace and judgment. We see death and healing. In the end, you can find what you want in the pages of the Bible.

The protestant revolution occurred because the Bible was being withheld from people. Henceforth, the Bible would be available to all people in their language. This gave people the ability to have their own relationship with God apart from their clergy, and it provided checks to the teaching of the priestly class. These were all good things. Over the years, in America we have taken this to the extreme; allowing and expecting lay people to rightly interpret the Bible for themselves. This is especially true in the evangelical church and even more true in the Pentecostal parts of that.

Coupling a diverse Bible and Hyper individualism naturally leads down this path.

Step 1, Picking and Choosing

I want you all to know that I pick and choose what I believe from the Bible. That’s shocking because all my life pastors have been pulpit shaming “people that pick and choose.” I never believed I did so; however the fact is we all pick and choose what we want to believe and/or prioritize from the Bible. Of course few people admit such a thing. Demonstrating attribution theory, the unwritten assumption is that, the others, THEY pick and choose based on their corrupt personal desires. On the other hand WE follow scripture completely and only leave out those things that are clearly not for today. That is not pick and choosing! Right!? No. We all pick and choose, and I don’t believe our criteria is as noble as we would like to think.

I believe we decide what to pick primarily based on the traditions of our tribe and our personal preferences. We may think that our choices are based only on the Holy Spirit and biblical scholarship, but many, I’m betting most, are not. Christianity is a lot like going to a cafeteria with a limited budget and one plate, not the ones like Golden Corral where you eat whatever you can stuff in. It’s more like the ones you find in the basement of government buildings in Washington DC. You get one plate and you can only fill it once. On the buffet are many contradictory options, all found in the Bible. 

• Anger
• Peace
• Law
• Grace
• Mercy
• Judgement
• Genocide
• Salvation
• Love for a few
• Love for all

Once you decide to be a Christian you go to the buffet and pick the items you want. Your personality and church tradition will be the primary guides as you begin to fill your plate. Tough second amendment guy? You might feel comfortable with a helping of righteous anger. LGBT? You should take some love for all. We believe that our theology molds our character, and in part it does. But it is just as significant, or more significant, that our character molds our theology.

Lets look at me as a case study. My top 5 Gallup strengths are:

1. Strategic
2. Learner
3. Responsibility
4. Analytical
5. Relator

Strategic people tend toward the big picture. Theologically, I default to the macro trends in the Bible as opposed to various proof texts. I know many Christians that will look for a verse or two to find wisdom, but I will always first ask if the wisdom fits with the overall narrative of the biblical story, God's strategy. It astounds me that other Christians don't believe the same, reading the same Bible.

The learner part doesn't directly affect what I believe. Rather it affects how I believe. I never get to the place where I am certain I know the answer to theological questions. I am always open the idea that I am lacking some key piece of knowledge, therefore, I am willing to listen to those that interpret scriptures differently whether through conversations, books, or podcasts. It astounds me that other Christians don't believe the same, reading the same Bible.

The responsibility part has made me a Christian environmentalist. It is entirely clear to me that we are responsible to care for creation. It is clear that we have a responsibility to right the wrongs of the past and work diligently to fix society ills. It astounds me that other Christians don't believe the same, reading the same Bible.

The analytical part of me writes to understand God. Writing thoughts down helps me understand the thoughts, if not the God behind them. I watch for relationships between inputs/outputs and cause/effects in the Christian experience and in the scriptures to try to make sense. It astounds me that other Christians don't believe the same, reading the same Bible.

The relator part of me makes me care for people and their relationship with me personally and the church corporately before analyzing the sins they commit. Jesus demonstrations of love for and relationship with lost people speak much more than condemnations in the Bible. I am convinced that love proceeds trust which proceeds any relationship with Jesus. It astounds me that other Christians don't believe the same, reading the same Bible.

Of course, me, a single data point does not prove a theory. However, I have observed this connection between personality and theology over and over. I am sure you have things you believe, that fit your personality, that are so clear from the pages of the Bible, and it astounds you that other Christians don't believe the same, reading the same bible.

Step 2, Confirmation

Here our natural tendency toward confirmation bias affects us. After we choose our theological plate, we start looking around within our community, assisted by social media, and “amazingly” find data everywhere that confirms our choices. Christianity as we have made it allows each person to define their own truth. The ironic thing  is that we pulpit shame the culture for thinking they can define their own truth, while our hyper individualistic theology encourages Christian’s to do the same albeit within the bounds of the Bible and using Christian language. Most evangelical churches and most evangelicals believe they uniquely understand the truth of scripture. Every one hit the jackpot and we are all winners. 

Step 3, Certainty Issues

Finally we wrongly believe in certainty. We conflate certainty with spiritual maturity, so if you want to be a good Christian you can’t doubt anything. You must be certain that:

• You are saved
• You sense God
• You hear from God
• You know what the Bible means
• You know truth
• You have the correct theology
• You have the correct politics
• You are raising your children right
• and so on

Just believing that you can be certain about all these things is intense. Believing that you MUST be certain about them is unbelievable pressure. When we couple this pressure with the, oh so common to evangelicalism, fear of the slippery slope, we have a potent cocktail where people must be right about everything and suddenly many Christian’s find themselves intransigent and on the narcissism spectrum.

Once you fall into the hole of intransigence, you can not be wrong. Anything must be sacrificed because if you are proven wrong on one point you are completely wrong, and your faith and salvation are in question. I know someone holding so tightly to their being right that they are sacrificing their relationship with their child, mother, future grandchildren, and siblings. It will be a painful day when there is a realization that they gave up all those relationships to be right when being all right is actually wrong and not what Jesus requires.

We begin our journey toward difference by picking and choosing what we like from the Bible. We become more committed to those beliefs encouraged by American individualistic biblical teaching, confirmation bias, and social media. Then finally we lose our mind when we conflate Christianity and certainty. No one can hint we might be wrong and we sacrifice all on the altar of being right. Repeat this process over and over and we have an evangelical church in America with such a divergence of views and extreme commitment to them the church can only push the world away.