Thanks to all of you who thought that I was a really useless Christian when they read my post about Lynne and yet refrained from commenting or pointing out the screaming inconsistencies of this blog.
That afternoon with Lynne really did get me thinking. Or rather it confused me for a week in which I was just numb and unable to process information. Of course, Lynne was protective of her violent boyfriend –and therefore wary of those of us in the mainstream who think otherwise and who might have taken action against him. But there was more, and again it is related to something I learned through teaching.
At the beginning of my teaching career I received an excellent piece of advice: “We never teach, we make it easy for students to steal from us”. I sat back as this sunk in. The initiative must come from them; we just do our thing and make it easy for people to steal from us. I think of all the theology I’ve picked up in the past few months just by “stealing” if from blogs. At one point I was getting so good at stealing that I almost resented direct advice.
So yeah, I had lots of relatively good ideas, but I totally robbed Lynne of the initiative. I think I was mistaken to think in “Good Samaritan” terms. This could have been an improvement from just tossing a coin, but we needed a further improvement. That of not forcing things. That of letting Lynne “steal” whatever she needed from me, over a period of time -and meanwhile I would also get to learn from her wisdom. Of course, for this to happen it would have been useful for us to live in the same part of town. But hang on a sec, did I just steal that from poserorprophet?
At the beginning of my teaching career I received an excellent piece of advice: “We never teach, we make it easy for students to steal from us”. I sat back as this sunk in. The initiative must come from them; we just do our thing and make it easy for people to steal from us. I think of all the theology I’ve picked up in the past few months just by “stealing” if from blogs. At one point I was getting so good at stealing that I almost resented direct advice.
So yeah, I had lots of relatively good ideas, but I totally robbed Lynne of the initiative. I think I was mistaken to think in “Good Samaritan” terms. This could have been an improvement from just tossing a coin, but we needed a further improvement. That of not forcing things. That of letting Lynne “steal” whatever she needed from me, over a period of time -and meanwhile I would also get to learn from her wisdom. Of course, for this to happen it would have been useful for us to live in the same part of town. But hang on a sec, did I just steal that from poserorprophet?
4 comments:
I actually only read your post about Lynne yesterday. I was going to leave a comment but then I remembered that I still owe you an email (I think) so I figured it would be best to fly under the radar.
Anyway, I continue to enjoy what you write. Living Christianly is sort of like an endless process of ad-libbing as we learn how to perform our faith. The problem for most of us is that we don't have much practice ad-libbing in situations like the one you described with Lynne. In fact, I think pretty much all of us tend to have regrets about how we first handled situations like that. Of course, the benefit of being in the same neighbourhoods as people like Lynne is that we get the chance to perfect our ad-libbing and produce a rather solid performance.
Grace and peace.
I remembered that I still owe you an email (I think) so I figured it would be best to fly under the radar.
Actually that's okay, I'm also trying to fly under your radar: commenting on your church-and-capitalism series is taking me ages! But don't worry I can be fairly teachy still, and I am duly tearing it apart. Have you handed it in yet?
As for the story with Lynne, I'm ashamed of the distance that existed between us, which I created by walking in the situation as if I was Tintin or something. I'm realising how aggressive that can be. I really love dissing all the other dogooders so I'm actually grateful that nobody has thought of mentionning specks and logs on that post yet.
I submitted the paper to two economists -- one who teaches at my grad school and another who teaches at the business school at the University of British Columbia. I got it back the other day -- A+ (and I was encouraged to try and publish it). I don't mind waiting while you now go and make the appropriate revisions to your response. Up yours, Tintin!
I was also thinking that you should try to publish it, quite possibly in book form: the material is superb... -insert loaded silence about the form here.
I shall now make my critiques fiercer still. What do these economists think they are, experts?
Post a Comment