Blog 13: My Epic Stupidity.

I want to tell you about my epic fail.

And why it’s important.

You know… a story, a lesson… lather, rinse, repeat…

Here it is. An absolutely true story from just this past Saturday.

I wrote this totally sweet sermon. One that I was(and still am) quite proud of. It was informative, interesting, detailed, only moderately relevant, but useful in an interpretation-of-scripture sort of way.

Now, the point of that sermon is completely irrelevant for today’s story. What is important was that I was excited about how cool the subject matter was. Well, cool to me at least. But that’s a different story.

So, there I am, throwin’ it down. I’m throwin’ it down like a Jesus monkey on crack(umm…???). I’m into it. I’m feeling it. The words are flowing. And I’m talking. And I’m talking faster.

As a side note, I tend to exaggerate some. I actually don’t slam the pulpit or shout and scream when I preach.

FYI.

As I’m into it and talking and making my point I made an itsy bitsy little slip.

As it turns out, if you say the words “city should” back to back too quickly, there is a slight risk that you might, let’s say… mix up, the first letters/sounds of each word. “Should” comes out as “could”, and “city” comes out as… well, you know.

As I stood there and blatantly used the descriptive expletive, I kept talking, but was quickly scanning to see if anyone had noticed my slip. I didn’t have to look beyond the second row as my wife, apparently, was having an aneurism from trying to keep the hysterical laughter from spilling out into actual sound.

Apparently, I wasn’t going to get away with it.

But like any “good” preacher, I just pretended nothing had happened and kept on truckin’.

Fortunately, no one, besides my wife, mentioned it to me. It was nice of them all to be understanding of the fact that I’m human, and, apparently, an idiot.

Now, what does this, you ask, have to do with the price of smack in Columbia?

As I reflected on my moment of embarrassment… like ya do… I started thinking about how, while that particular example was relatively innocent, that incident is sort of a metaphor(I have no idea if that’s the correct word…) or analogy(maybe it’s this one…) of a more serious issue.

It’s sort of an adjunct to a previous blog about checking things out and making sure we know what we know.

This, however, is about getting ahead of ones self. Just like how I was talking away and trying to think faster than my mouth could keep up, ending in disaster, we often latch on to ideas and run with them, often to the exclusion of the actual facts. We put an idea together about something and it just fits. It’s perfect. And we go with it. And we share it. And we hold it up as the glowing standard of epiphany. Completely oblivious to the reality of it’s flaws. Completely ignoring those who shed light on our ignorance.

And because our idea is so profound, we start molding the rest of thought around this perfect truth. This idea that impacts the rest of our thought which suddenly starts forming the basis of our larger belief system until we have run headlong down a path without even knowing where we are going.

We liked the idea soo much, we never actually stopped to check out the validity of it. It was just THAT perfect.

We got ahead of ourselves.

I’ve done it. More than once. I’m probably doing it right now. I hope not, but it’s possible.

This is where personal honesty must come in to play. One must be honest enough with themselves to be willing to admit the possibility of personal error. If we don’t, then we don’t have any check or balance in our thinking. It’s just raw brainstorm run amuck.

There’s no intellectual honesty.

It get’s the point where we just start defending our view, because it’s our view. It’s no longer about the facts. It’s purely about me being right and you being wrong. Because if I’m wrong about this, then I might be wrong about something else. And if that’s true, maybe it’s all wrong. Then, not only does my entire belief system collapse, but I also have to acknowledge that someone else was smarter than me.

And, holy gravy, do we humans hate to admit that. Always.

While my verbal snafu isn’t really a problem at all and serves merely as an illustration of a greater point, I did have the real issue slap me in the face twice in the last two weeks. Once because I was a moron and once because someone else was.

Here is mine.

There is a particular belief amongst my people(religious denominational types) that is popular and semi controversial. I’m not going to outline this belief here on these pages. If you really, truly, want to know, I’ll discuss it in private with you. What is important is that I have pretty much always held to the traditional view on the subject. I know, I know… that seems so unlike me. But it’s true. It made sense. At least from a certain perspective. And I was ok with that. It was simple and straightforward.

And I bought into it. So much so, that when people over the years have tried to question it or point out flaws in it, I staunchly, yet politely, let them know that they must be wrong. One person in particular is one of my most trusted friends. His opinion is of great value to me. He forces me to make sure I know what I believe. Even with him, I argued until we just agreed to disagree. Sure, I thought he was wrong. But mostly, it was because I wanted to be right.

We’ve had the discussion a number of times over the years. Even recently. And every time we’ve finished the discussion I’ve always left with the idea that in no way was I buying what he was selling. Not at all.

So last week I’m reading my bible. I’m in the middle of prayer meeting. After we spend our time in group prayer and praise, we then have a bible study/discussion. And during this study, we start with our chapter, take turns reading verses till we read all the way through. When finished, I go back to the beginning of the chapter, and lead the discussion by taking each verse or idea reading it aloud again and asking questions.

Well, we’ve finished and I’m now re-reading and asking questions. As I’m re-reading one section, I read this one verse. And in this verse, it blatantly an directly related to this issue that my friend and I have discussed time and again. It gave the answer(one of a number of verses, it turns out…) to the dilemma of our disagreement.

Once again, I was slapped in the face with solid proof that I am, in fact, an idiot. It was so obvious that I was wrong. I couldn’t have been more wrong. And as I sat there staring at the verse, the rest of the room wondering why I was just sitting there staring at the bible, all the implications of my mistake just fell together like pieces to a puzzle.

The obviousness was embarrassing. For me to have missed something so simple was an insult to my pride and ego(I think we’ve talked about that one before as well…).

I was wrong.

I was going to have to eat crow.

I had been so sure. Completely confident in my stance.

Completely confident in a fallacy.

My friend knew it, and had been very patient with me.

Now, I won’t lie to you. He has a couple other conjoining theories that I still think are inaccurate. But really, that doesn’t matter at all. What matters is that, I was inaccurate and didn’t want to see it.

I refused to see it.

That is very, very dangerous.

The kicker is, the argument for my point wasn’t even grounded in the bible. (I’m laughing right now as I think about how utterly stupid I can be. It’s awesome. *ugh*)

I’m not even going to go into details on the other one. Mostly because my failure was just as bad as hers, and I’d be a hypocrite to point at her for playing with matches while I’m in the process of dousing my head in gas and tossing a lighter on it.

But basically, she tore me up one side and down the other this week because I wasn’t teacher her what she already knew.

That’s right. You didn’t read that wrong. The point of bible study is to go beyond and teach what is not obvious and to give more and go deeper. And for her, going deeper is to have someone recite to her exactly what she already knows, because in that way, she won’t have to think about it and she runs zero possibility of being wrong in some way.

You should have been there. It was classic.

And yet, she was only doing the same thing I’d been doing for years. It seems that the students really don’t rise any higher than their teachers.

We both got ahead of ourselves. Completely self assured in our intellectual smugness. Totally engrossed in our own understanding that we denied the very possibility that we made a mistake.

This can’t happen.

It mustn’t happen. Not if we want to grow as a person. Not if we want to become something more than we are. Not if we want to be useful to those around us in any meaningful way.

Another friend of mine has this quote on her Facebook page.

"Let us dare to read, think, speak, write. Let every sluice of knowledge be open and set flowing." -- John Adams

This is a powerful principle and challenge. Powerful because it pushes us to grow. Powerful because it absolutely requires personal honesty and intellectual humility.

It’s the difference between epic failure and epic success.

Blog 12: Perspective.

May the force be with you.

Hmm, is that even a greeting?

I have no idea.

Today the temperature rose over 25 degrees by lunch time. And it was still below and it was still -2 outside. Do you know what that means?

It is very... very... cold outside.

It's been like this most of the week. Crazy cold. I know, there are places in Siberia, or Alaska, or Canada, or the NORTH POLE... that are colder. But this is much colder than we normally get around here. Oh, it get's cold. But temperatures like -32 and -28 are usually what our wind chill is.But the actual temp? Ya... brrrr.

It's an interesting perspective to have my furnace set to 70 and I'm still freezing inside. I thought, "what if my furnace stopped working? What if my car broke down 30 miles from nowhere? What if I got super powers and could create cold with my mind?"

Actually, I have problems with keeping my train of thought focused. Ignore the last one up there.

But I thought about having to brave the elements. I bundled up and walked outside to the curb to bring in my trash container. And in the 30 seconds it took me to run down and back, my fingers were completely numb. As I warmed up inside, I was confronted with the reality of how fragile the barrier is between comfort and agony. One would think that, after the things I've been through over the last few years, I would have had a good grasp on the concept of not taking anything for granted.

Well, one would be wrong. Apparently.

I had to pick up one of my poorer church members for prayer meeting this week. As I waited outside his apartment building, I watched people come in and out of this subsidized housing complex. People without cars. People bundling up and walking to the store.

In -17 degree weather. And lots of wind.

And my first thought was, as I watched one particular man stroll out... the kind of guy who gives the appearanc of one who's elevator doesn't go to the top, if you know what I mean... as I watched him go out, my first thought was, "Sucks to be him."

And immediately I felt ashamed. Because it really DOES suck to be him. The chances that this guy was going to have frost bite before he got home were pretty good. And this is what he does every day. How close was he to not having a home at all?

How close was he to having to sleep under a bridge? When it's -30 at night and windy?

It was at this point that I realized just how blessed I really am. I think about all the whining I do about bills. All the "compromise" that has to go in to planning a good vacation with my wife. You know what I'm talking about, right? That whole cost vs. fun discussion? We want have X amount of fun, be we only have Y amount of money?

This Christmas I bought my wife a new laptop. Her old one was literally days away from permanent death. So, I found the proper bargain and bought it for her. I also found the bargain for me as well, since my computer, which is even older than hers, is dying. Slower than hers, but still dying.

After Christmas I went and bought mine. It wasn't exactly what I wanted, but it was close enough. One must be responsible and make the proper compromises, right?

Well, to make a long story short, after 4 days I had to take it back cause it was broken. No, I didn't break it. The tech guy was like, "ya, this isn't your fault, it shouldn't do this."So he opened a new one. It did the same thing. He opened another. It also did the same thing. He opened on of the same brand but different model? Same thing.

Broken. All of them.

In the end, they refunded my money and I gave back the computer.

But I figured, hey, I'll just find something else.

Well, then the brakes exploded on our car.

Exploded is probably an exageration. No one died. The car is fine. But I did have to pay to fix them.

There went the computer money. To this day, I still do not have a new computer. When I did the math and realized I wouldn't be able to get my new laptop, I was pissed. I was so mad. I couldn't believe how unfair it was that I basically had to give up my christmas present and not get it back.

And as I sat in the car staring at a building full of people who are half a well-fare check from freezing to death, I began to see what a blessed/spoiled child I was. It wasn't enough that I'm not dead from disease. If I couldn't have my toys, I needed to pout like a baby and tell God how unfair it is.

And here is a guy who is walking to where ever in ungodly weather. I have a house. A nice house. Two cars that run every day. An awesome wife. Good friends. Good family. I never go hungry. I always have hot showers.

Really, I live like a king.

I am so blessed and I never even acknowledge it. Almost never, anway. Instead, I act like I deserve it. Like it's owed to me somehow.

Perspective is such an important thing. Sometimes perspective is the only thing between happiness and discouragement. Actually, I'd say perspective is always the only thing between happiness and discouragement.

I know. This is all cliche, right? The preacher telling people that they need to look at the bad in their life differently so they can be happy.Right. Or, telling people to be grateful for what they have and stop their whining.

Right.

Well, maybe those things are all true. I'm sure they are. But I think we hear it so much, sometimes we stop to think about the truth of it all. Ya, I've been sick and I've had to stretch paychecks. But I could be homeless. And right now that would mean almost certain death. If not, I'd wish it did. I could be alone. But I'm not. I have a crazy cool wife.

What is in your life that you take for granted without even realizing it?

At this moment, for me, it's heat. Because I'm sitting in my office in my basement, and it's down right cold down here. But i'm wearing a t shirt. So, really, it can't be THAT cold.

Perspective. It's such an amazing thing.

Perspective is why a lesbian couple can walk into one of my churches, and one person will welcome them with a hug, and another person will complain and be disgusted that they would dare to enter "God's house."

True story, by the way.

Perspect is the difference between order and chaos. Patterns and random. One person's random is another person's pattern.

Have you ever heard of Fractals? I'm not going to trying to bore you with the math, because I would just butcher it to pieces and there is at least one math genius that I know of who is going to read this and I would prefer to avoid the embarassment.

But the short of it is this. Fractals are a type of math that, for all practical purpose, shows the pattern in random. It's an equation that, if you plot it out on a graph, makes all kinds of beautiful, albeit chaotic looking patterns. They really are pretty. You've probably all seen them. Lots of swirls with jaggedy edges all over them. But definately not orderly by any means.

Until you start looking closely. If you take a small piece of the shape, and blow it up big, you notice that the small piece looks exactly like the large piece. And if you magnify a small piece of that smaller chunk, you will notice that the even smaller piece also looks exactly like the larger chunk. As a matter of fact, it doesn't matter how far you zoom in, it will always look exactly like the large piece. It will follow the exact same pattern.

What appears chaotic isn't chaotic at all. It's actually following a very specific pattern. It's just not a pattern you can see till you change your perspective.The story and applications for fractals are incredibly fascinating. The implications of fractals are huge. Mind blowing even.

Take the forest, for example. Fractal math showed that if you take one tree in a forest and measure that tree at multiple points on it's trunk, branches, leaves, etc... and plot out all these measurements in a fractal equation, you can use the equation from that tree to predict the growth of the entire forest.

I don't mean just the size of the trees. But their location. The density of the forest itself. You can predict how the forest will spread out as it grows.

No joke.

A bunch of math guys proved it. They measured a single tree, then randomly sampled the forest. Different trees, sizes, species, etc... all of it. It ploted exactly the same.

Cool stuff.

But the point is, how random does a forest look to you? It's not ordered. The trees aren't all lined up. They aren't all the same type. They aren't all the same size. They aren't all the same distance from each other. In no visible way is there any repeating pattern that is discernable. It's all just completely beautiful and random chaos.

Except that it isn't. It follows a very specific pattern. It's just a pattern we can't see. We lack the proper perscpective.

I could go on and on about how there is no such thing as chaos and random, but that everything follows a pattern and has an order to it.

Because I believe that is true. Math is proving that more and more every day.

But instead I want to point out how perspective shapes everything we see and do. As much as it's cliche and as much as no one wants to admit it, happiness and despair, success and failure... it is all completely and utterly dependant on our perspective. On how we choose to quantify things. On how we choose to measure things.

Whether it's how you measure blessing or success, or how you quantify your own self worth, all of it is based on our own perspective.

Ask a color blind person what color his socks are. Perspective shapes our reality.I met a guy recently who is completely color blind. By that I mean, he doesn't see any colors at all. Only shades of grey. Everything he sees is a shade of grey. He doesn't know what yellow looks like. Or blue. Or red. He only knows what yellow is based on the shade of grey that he sees. And he does a really good job. You would never know that he's completely color blind.

His perspective is much different than mine in a real way.

How about the autistic savant? Can't figure out how to tie his shows, but can count change by the sound it makes as it hits the floor, and can play master level piano arrangements without ever taking a lesson, or sees music as a language expressed by math.

What does his world look like?

Or, I suppose, the real question is... what does our world ACTUALLY look like?

Here is the truth and, ultimately, the point I would like to make here.

We see exactly what we choose to see. What we want to see. Maybe not what we think we want to see, but in reality, what we want to see.

Our perspective and our reality are the same. It is a chosen "reality." Blessing, curse, order, chaos, happiness, dispair,... these are the illusions of our minds eye.

Here is the question I want to leave you with.

What does your world look like?

And, why?