Most of the people that I hang out with these days are moms of young children. I probably need to work harder at connecting with people in other life stages, but that’s a topic for another post.
I used to spend a good bit of time with college freshmen. I taught composition and grammar for seven years, and for the most part, I loved it. Freshmen are a crazy bunch, but they are fun incarnate. And as part of their first giant step into adulthood, it was an incredible opportunity and responsibility.
My teaching style was kind of crazy (I talk fast, think fast, move fast, teach fast). I worked hard to be “fun” and still cover my intended topics. We played games and watched movie clips. I let them write papers on almost any topic. I admitted freely that my class was boring, but I tried equally as hard to prove that it was valuable to their future success.
And I did that through what I called my “soapboxes” – the big ideas I wanted them to get, even if they still couldn’t write a paper at the end of the semester. These were my soapboxes:
Turn your brain on. I challenged them to THINK. God calls us to love Him with our minds, and that means our minds are valuable and necessary tools for interacting with Him and with the world around us. We will always be surrounded by conversations and debates and “pick a side” discussions, and rather than avoid them, we need to bring the Spirit with us into those arenas. We are also constantly inundated with messages, very few of them biblical, and we need Him to give us clarity and wisdom about what we listen to or read or watch. As believers, our faith needs to make our minds stronger, not weaker – should make us better thinkers, not worse.
Be humbly certain of what you believe. I told my student that there are absolutes, things like the deity of Christ that are truths worth dying for. But outside of those handful of absolutes, there are thousands and thousands of ideas and arguments and beliefs to which we don’t know the complete “right” answer. And in those cases, I wanted them to be “humbly certain.” Certain enough that you are willing to argue about it, but humble enough to allow for the possibility that you might be wrong. In other words, think through what you believe, research it, know it, be able to defend it and then share those beliefs but with humility. We have to honestly consider the possibility that we might not have all the information, that there might be more to the issue than we’ve considered. Being “humbly certain” is an attitude that says “I know what I believe, but I will give you a chance to prove me wrong.” And while our opponents will rarely offer a true challenge, we, as finite beings, have to leave open the possibility that we are not always totally right.
Learn to make a good argument. Most people do not argue well. They throw a bunch of ideas together and act like that should convince even the worst sceptic. They have zero logic (or very bad logic) holding together their ideas, and they wonder why people won’t take them seriously. Christians wonder why non-Christians just roll their eyes when they stand up to “make a case” for the topic of the hour. It’s because they can’t argue. And it is not acceptable. We must learn to present what we think well, with good logic and excellent support. And if we can learn to do this, we will quickly move to a position of influence wherever we are. We can actually become the ones whom other people follow because we think and express ourselves well.
Learn to Research Well. Your positions are only as good as the information you use to defend and support them. But most people research as poorly as they argue. We have to know where to get information and then, having found it, how to analyze it. A valuable principle to keep in mind: people are always innocent until proved guilty, but information has to be suspect until proven trustworthy.
And here’s the thing…I’ve been thinking recently how much those soapboxes still apply, even to my current life and the people I know.
I always told my freshmen that they needed to know what they believed and learn how to defend those ideas well. But as moms, we have an even greater responsibility because our ideas and choices and ways of living will have direct influence on our kids and the generation of which they are a part. We have to make our decisions with even greater care, and I wonder how many women are lacking the necessary tools to do this well.
So I’m going to do my very first blog “series” on this topic. I’ve never done anything like this before, but it’s been brewing in my mind for weeks, and I can’t stop myself now. So here’s the plan – I’m going to go through my soapboxes, one at a time, applying them to moms. How can we use these ideas to figure out what we think and make wise decisions for ourselves and our families? How should we go about getting information for the decisions we are trying to make? And how do we discuss our conclusions without every conversation dissolving into “the mommy wars” again? This is not about the conclusions we come to, it’s about how we get to our conclusions (and how to get there better than we do now).
I hope someone other than me finds these ideas interesting and useful. But if this stuff doesn’t mean anything to you, that’s okay…I’ll write updates about my kids (and my dishwasher) again soon. This area is just very dear to my heart, and I consider it one of the few things I have to offer that very few other can.
So…here comes Soapbox #1!
April 25, 2012
oooooooooh, i’m excited!!
April 27, 2012
Man I wish I could have been in one of your classes!! You sound like an awesome professor!