Seeing faces in the crowd

As foster parents, you have certain choices to make about the kinds of kids you will bring into your home. What ages do you want them to be? Will you take special needs children? What races of children will you accept? While DHS in Mississippi calls no matter what you say you are willing to take, you always have the right to refuse any children that do not meet your criteria. Some questions were easy for us to answer. We could not see closing our home to children of other races. We wanted children from 5-10 years old so they would be in school because my wife was working at the time we signed up for foster care (though she has since quit her job and we have left that restriction behind).

Choosing which children will enter your home without know their names or seeing their faces is an interesting process. I was tempted to say that we would no longer take kids from another county after our last experience, not because of the kids themselves but because of the difficulties and time consuming nature of traveling out of county so often. When you don’t know who the next group of kids will be, it’s easy to say that you want to exclude anyone from another county. But thinking back, I would never have chosen to keep our prior group of kids out of our home because of where they lived. It’s easy to so no to a generic child you’ve never met, but saying no to a face and a name, a person, is much different.

Through this process I am reminded of how much we see types of people instead of people. We see black people or white people, rich people or poor people. We see special needs kids or kids with behavior problems, and sometimes we’re scared by the types of people we see. Types of people rarely move us to compassionate action, but instead these types often paralyze us in worry or fear. But when we begin to see individual people instead of faceless masses, we begin to find the compassion that is so often missing in our lives. I have seen this in some of our friends who are beginning the process of adopting a son from Ethiopia. They went from seeing millions of children all across the world to seeing a son in Ethiopia waiting for a family. Even though they have never seen his face, they see him through the throngs of orphans (you can follow their story here).

So often we try to cater our lives to meet all our specifications, when God often confounds those expectations. If God only gave us the kind of things we wanted, if he allowed us to arrange everything just the way we desire, how would we ever grow? I pray that I would allow God to confound my expectations, and I pray that I would see people as people, not as categories or statistics.

Foster Parenting- Take Two

We are not yet 72 hours into our second placement as foster parents, and I thought I would offer some random musings. It’s going to be hard not to have unrealistic expectations each time a new group of kids comes into our home. We will expect the new kids to start off where the prior group left off, which is unrealistic on so many levels. Subconsciously I expect the kind of bonding that we enjoyed before, even though those bonds developed over eight months, not three days. It’s hard not to expect the kind of behavior that developed over eight months to be there in three days with new kids.

I guess the hard part of this whole process has been starting over, teaching the same things from scratch that we just got through instilling in one group of kids, earning trust and love from someone who did not know who we were three days ago. I expect all those things to be immediate this time around, when once more we will have to go through the long journey of earning love and trust.

Looking back to our last group of kids, I have found that I remember the good times far more than the bad. I remember the smiles, the games, the hugs, and the love, while the fits, the fights, and the tantrums seem like distant memories. When I think back, I can certainly remember that the hard times happened (and that at several points I thought I was going to lose my mind), but the hard times seem so small compared to the beauty of those four precious faces smiling at me in my mind. I suppose this rosy view of the past is helpful in many ways. More than anything it reminds me that the bad times are worth enduring. Paul said that our present sufferings are not worth comparing to the glory that will be revealed in us, and perhaps in a smaller way, the hard times of fostering are not worth comparing to the joys of being loved by those precious children.

I suppose the lesson for the day is patience. When it feels like we have taken twenty steps backward in so many ways, we cannot jump ahead, but we must patiently walk our way forward, understanding that all that happened last time will happen again this time, just not in three days.

All of this makes me think about how patient God must be with me. I am sure at times He feels like I have fallen right back into a place I should have abandoned years ago. I’m sure it seems that I am learning the same lessons over and over again. As the children’s song taught me “He’s still working on me, to make me what I ought to be.” If God is so patient with me, how can I be anything but patient with others? I’m not there yet, but maybe this whole process will get me closer than I have been before.

A stands for Admit that I am wrong

Do we really want to know if we are wrong? My suspicion is that most of us don’t. We (I) would rather go on assuming our rightness than have someone challenge us to evaluate our assumptions, our actions, or our ministries. Does this mean that we will fail to grow as individuals? Probably. But sometimes the pain of honest evaluation seems too much to bear, no matter the benefits.

I have never been a part of a church that has seriously evaluated how they do church, but then again, perhaps I have never been prone to seriously evaluating what I do either. If I took a closer look at myself, I might find more areas for growth than would make me comfortable. But how vital is self-examination and learning from our failures to growth as believers? Tim Harford in his book Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure argues that failure, feedback, and rigorous examination are all necessary parts of the growth process.

As with The Upside of Irrationality (see previous post), Harford’s book is thoroughly secular, but once again, I think we can glean some principles from the basics of his analysis. First, we must be willing to hear honest feedback; in fact, we should probably demand honest feedback if we have any desire to grow. Call it accountability, call it constructive criticism, call it whatever you want, we need others who will challenge our deeply held convictions, traditions, and self-images. As church leaders, we are often hesitant to hear honest feedback. After all, shouldn’t a seminary graduate know much more about how to do church than a “simple lay person,” equipped only with the meager tools of God’s Word and the Holy Spirit? But the hardest part of hearing constructive criticism is often not in hearing the criticism, but facing the possibility that we might be wrong, or at the very least that we might need to change. This fear of change is likely what keeps us from evaluating what we do as churches. If we looked hard enough and found that our methods aren’t working, we would be forced to stare change in the eye, a daunting prospect for any church. But if we refuse to ask the hard questions, like are we really succeeding in fulfilling God’s mission for us as a church, we will continue to meander through life blithely unaware of our many shortcomings.

Second, Harford suggests that we must provide room for the bad ideas if we want to get to the good ideas. Many churches have become places of conformity. We group people together by age, area of interest, preferred style of music, etc. When people or ideas that are risky, different, or threatening appear, we often try to squash them before the rest of the church gets “infected.” Harford argues quite to the contrary that really great ideas come about when diversity is prevalent. We don’t get to the best ideas by weeding out anything that is different or challenging to our preconceptions. In more Christian terms, orthodoxy is often strengthened when confronted with heresy, not when orthodoxy is shielded from heresy.

To apply these thoughts to the church, we need all kinds of people to help move our churches in the right direction. We need people with ideas that seem crazy, and we need to listen to them long enough to understand their perspective. We need people different than “us,” who think differently than we do, who have different gifts. Or to use Paul’s image, it takes a lot of different parts to make up a body.

So what can I learn from Harford? I need to learn from my failures, but I can only do so after I have admitted that I might have failed in the first place. And often I will only see that I have failed if I am willing to listen to honest feedback from others. Finally, I must be willing to learn from people who have a different perspective than mine. When I think that other ideas are crazy or impractical, I am often saying more about my own limited perspective than the actual merit of the “crazy” idea.

I did it, therefore it must be right…

In The Upside of Irrationality Dan Ariely claims that humans are prone to acting irrationally. Sometimes our irrational tendencies are helpful, but at times our irrational tendencies lead us to make wrong choices. One way that our irrationality manifests itself is that we are powerfully conditioned to think that what we are doing, or the way we have always done things, is right. Ariely suggests:

“We need to doubt our intuitions. If we keep following our gut and common wisdom or doing what is easiest or most habitual just because ‘well things have always been done that way,’ we will continue to make mistakes—resulting in a lot of time, effort, heartbreak, and money going down the same old (often wrong) rabbit holes. But if we learn to question ourselves and test our beliefs, we might actually discover when and how we are wrong and improve the ways we love, live, innovate, manage, and govern.”

Ariely’s book is thoroughly secular, but perhaps Christians can learn from his conclusions. We are quite prone to viewing our way as the right way. Sometimes our habits are based on careful thinking, but perhaps more often we assume that our ways are right because we don’t like to admit we might be wrong. Ariely describes a phenomenon called “self-herding,” which means that we tend to replicate actions we have taken in the past, even when a careful examination of the situation might lead us to follow another path. We follow our past actions not always because they are right but because we are conditioned to assume that we must have been right.

Some in the church today have been arguing for a movement away from traditional methods of doing church by asking ourselves how we would do church if all we had to base our practices on was the Bible. Certainly if we had the Bible and nothing else, and assuming that we really could forget all the traditions that are such a part of us, many churches likely would look very different. But is this radical rejection of any and all tradition other than what was passed on to us in Scripture really the best way to go?

Not all tradition is bad, but what we as churches need to learn from Ariely’s call to question everything is that just because we do something does not make it right. First, we must learn to question what we do. We must be open to the possibility that a different way of doing church might be much more effective in making disciples, and much more importantly, we must be willing to admit that God might be leading our churches into radically different ways of doing church. Second, we must allow Scripture to be the Great Tradition in our lives through which we evaluate all of our traditions as churches. We must learn to celebrate those traditions that lead us to be more biblical churches, and we must reject those traditions that are keeping us from being the churches God has called us to be. In the end, if we are unwilling to question what we have done and what we are doing, and if we are unwilling to follow the Spirit in new and uncomfortable directions, we will likely never be more than we were yesterday, as churches or as Christians.