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.