There’s a deception that I’ve come to … well, I don’t know
that I actually “hate” it, but I sure don’t love it.
It’s a deception, an illusion, and it’s perpetrated, many
times, in God’s name, and often with the best of intentions.
It’s the deception of the finished lesson.
I became aware of it while I was studying something-or-other
for teaching. I felt like I was wrestling a greased pig. I cut my way through
bunny trails and wild goose chases and fought off premature and inaccurate
conclusions.
It was a long and arduous process.
And when I was done, I presented my results to the folks I
was teaching, all tidy, all logical, all wrapped up with a nice little bow on
it.
It was good teaching. And my conclusions were both accurate
and relevant.
But I was uncomfortable with how tidy it was. This was not a
tidy topic, and I felt that I’d done folks a disservice by hiding the blood,
sweat, toil and tears that went into the process.
In actual fact, the blood, sweat, toil and tears are a
legitimate part of the topic, of the conversation. Let’s be honest: outside of
TV shows, there aren’t a lot of thorny questions that tidily wrap themselves up
in 30 minutes, are there?
It seems to me that the need to make things tidy and clean
and neat is not actually a benefit to American culture.
Let’s be specific. If we think that the abortion issue has a
clean and simple answer, we’re not paying attention. If we think that the topic
of social justice can be solved easily, we’re smoking something interesting. If
we think the fear of God, or the grace of God, or the rapture, or the solution
to immigration, or balancing a household budget have tidy answers, we’re not
seeing the whole of the subject.
Christian platitudes are an abysmal failure. But Christian
blogs and Christian books (and not-so-Christian books) that have clear-cut
answers are equally deceptive.
We’ll see how I respond to this, how I deal with this in the
future. As much as anyone else, I like having clear answers readily available,
and I like not looking like a dork as I stumble for an answer that actually
means something on a complex topic.
But we might find that not every post has a confident
conclusion. I don’t know. We’ll see how this turns out.
