Struggles Not In Common

A Carnival of Symbology

A trip to a night market in Taiwan is consistently one of the most memorable experiences for newcomers to the island. The barrage of colorful sights, music competing from different shops, smells of food cooking, of cigarette smoke, of flowing crowds like rivers of humanity, make for an absorbing, fascinating, and sometimes overwhelming introduction to Taiwan and "how things are" here.

Among the stalls you can find nearly everything; from delicate fruit, honey, and shaved ice creations to fried chicken butts on a stick, tacky souvenirs to designer handbags, discount kitchenware to silk ties... the only thing you're not likely to find is a spot quiet enough to make a phone call without shouting.

Among all this even a cursory examination of some of the smaller stalls will reveal a wide array of cigarette lighters, from led light-enhanced chrome zippos to cheap plastic bic-types, covered in random designs drawn from the global soup of symbology, everything from Snoopy to the Nazi flag.

An Arresting Symbol

Wait, the Nazi flag? You might be highly offended at this. It was certainly jarring to see on my first visit to Taiwan. But do you know the history behind the Nazi flag design and its instantly recognizable swastika? It's not a symbol the Nazis made up, but a very, very old one co-opted by Hitler, with his fascination for ancient objects and symbols of power, and exploited in the Nazis' self-serving reconception of history according to their twisted ideals.

The term swastika actually comes from a Sanskrit word, svastika, which denotes a good luck charm or mark, and the symbol itself is thousands of years old, found across the ancient world from Roman mosaics to Japanese clan symbols. It was used for thousands of years as a religious or lucky symbol with various connotations, and became closely identified with Buddhism. Across East Asia, including my city district, it still is:

Does this offend you? Do you wince a little automatically when you see it? What might go through a visiting Jewish person's mind? Should Westerners for whom the symbol is 100% synonymous with hate, racism, and death camps try to get Buddhist people in Asia to stop using it, when that's not what it means to Buddhist people at all?

In Taiwan, the symbol can be seen fairly frequently. It's one of the most compelling reminders that I am not in the West, that I am in a place where even symbology is different, where what "everyone" instantly recognizes as a symbol of historic evil is instead regarded as a positive symbol and displayed in various religious contexts, even used on area maps in the subway stations to denote the locations of Buddhist temples. (Christian churches are marked with crosses).

The emotional impact of the symbol having been co-opted by the Nazis is simply absent here, to the extent that at times the graphic being used is the actual Nazi flag. While some might simply be trying to borrow a recognizable or "rebellious" symbol to put on the lighters or other places, its use in some other situations convinced me that often it's just a case of someone thinking it was a colorful version of the normal Asian religious symbol. The horrible and unbreakable associations of the symbol for Westerners don't exist here, because this is not the West. Though there was frequently contact and a bit of overlap, for the most part Far Eastern history is not Western history, and Western history is not Far Eastern history. Many horrible historical incidents and times of suffering in East Asia are enshrined in the cultural consciousness of people here, events of which most Westerners have never even heard, and vice versa. Our struggles are different, and the legacies of history that affect us today are different. That is part of what it means to be a member of a different culture.

When Symbol Interpretations Collide, Identities Suffer

What we might call "symbol conflict" is just one of the many discontinuities one encounters and must endure when crossing cultures. And now the internet, with its vast resources of instantly accessible information, provides uncountable opportunities for these encounters with no context whatsoever. If you saw a bunch of monks with swastikas on their heads, and didn't know the history of the symbol, you might be incredibly confused. Your imaginative explanation probably could not be devoid of references to Hitler, Nazis, or white supremacy movements, because that's the only context you know for that symbol.

Globalism means that our symbols, our cultural memes and shared understandings of things, more and more often rub up against different interpretations and understandings of the world. Sometimes these are mutually exclusive. Sometimes one interpretation wins, as we've seen in the US with the recently revived debate over the Confederate flag. To a minority, it's a meaningful and important symbol of the heritage of their land and culture, something that ties them to their forebearers and unites them as a group. That race-based slavery was part of that culture in the past is not seen as something positive, but is also not the primary association being made, any more than the primary association of the American flag for Americans is the conquest and slaughter of America's indigenous inhabitants. To the majority, however, the Confederate flag is simply a symbol of racism and slavery, and that interpretation has won out. Even as I write this, the flag is being taken down around the South in many official contexts where it was still being used, as Southerners in positions of authority decide that, rightly or wrongly, perceptions are not going to be changed by more explaining. (Whether demands to eliminate all symbols of Southern history will be taken seriously remains to be seen. There are many who desire, like a new Pharaoh, to have the names of old rivals chiseled away, erased from history itself.)

So the minority is being forced to abandon their symbol, because what it communicated to the majority outside the culture was not the same as what it communicated within their culture. And it may be that the majority is not particularly concerned with what the minority might think about these symbols as regards their identity, because any separate identity along those lines is also considered negative and desired to disappear. There are parallels to this in history. At the beginning of the Meiji era of Japanese history, when its rulers decided that Japan would become a modern nation and sought to imitate many Western ways and customs, many of the old feudal rules concerning the samurai were discarded en masse and new rules banning the distinctive samurai hairstyle and the wearing of swords put in place. Many samurai resisted to the utmost of their abilities, and there were large-scale rebellions; their very identity was bound up in these symbols, and their disappearance marked not only the end of their own role in society but the fading of an entire historical era into the past, never to return. No one likes to be declared a living obsoletion, socially undead. But the changes were inevitable, and the samurai were ended, and died off; victims, in a sense, of globalism in its early stages.

Samurai from the Satsuma clan, who initially fought with the Imperial Army
against a samurai army resisting the Meiji era government, then themselves
rebelled after realizing the new government would end the samurai way of life.
(This is the historical basis of the movie The Last Samurai, as described here)

Tolerance vs. the Will of the Majority

The swastika has not disappeared, however; it is a common sight in this part of the world. To be honest, I haven't gotten used to it yet, perhaps I never will. Perhaps I shouldn't, even outside of my home culture context. But I recognize that what it evokes for me is simply not what it evokes for the vast majority of people who grew up here. That's part of what it means to live as a minority in a culture different than one's home culture; in a nutshell, it doesn't matter what I think. It doesn't matter what the entire foreign expat community here thinks. If I began defacing every swastika I saw, I would be put in jail, and rightly so. It doesn't matter how it makes me feel, because my feelings are not those of the people of my host culture. I am not in the context from which those negative associations arose. Our historical struggles have been different; we've overcome different hardships and weathered different storms, and we've developed different symbols or have come to associate the same ones with very different meanings.

Truly accepting diversity means not pretending we are all the same. It means recognizing that some cultures and historical legacies are so different from ours that a powerfully negative symbol of hate in our culture can be a powerful symbol of blessing in theirs. If we understand this, we can accept it. But many people don't actually accept it. They simply abide what they can't change, but then change it at the first opportunity. "On earth as is best in my opinion." They can't accept any viewpoint other than their own, and so when they use the term diversity what they really mean is homogeneity; that there are and should be no differences between people, because lacking the supernatural love of Christ or even a culture of respect, which can stretch across wide barriers of creed or color, they have no means of handling real differences. Sometimes those who shout the loudest about diversity are actually proclaiming their inability to tolerate it. (They typically reveal themselves by trying to silence anyone who truly disagrees with them.)

A Struggle We Do Share

Everyone is not the same. Sometimes our worldviews are radically different and irreconcilable. Living and ministering in Taiwan means both trying to learn and understand the different worldviews of people in my new context, accepting what I can accept, and showing the love of Christ always -and respect where it is due- to those people who hold views I can't accept. After all, I still hold views Christ can't accept, and His love for me doesn't vary on that basis.

So our struggle is not whether we can love someone or not based on whether their ideas and cultural views are reconcilable with ours or not. The story of the Good Samaritan, told in response to someone asking Jesus who could be considered their neighbor (an attempt to narrow the love requirement down to as few people as possible), is about someone whose very identity as a "tainted blood" Jew was repugnant and unacceptable to Jesus' Jewish audience. The struggle is whether or not we can love our neighbors, whoever they might be and whatever they might think about the world. Tolerance can only accept differences, it cannot heal wounds. But the love of Christ expressed through we who know it can take the initiative; it does not need to pretend there are no barriers to leap across them and turn the different, into family.

An INTP on the Mission Field: Not Being Understood

(This is Part 3 in my current series on INTPs and Christian ministry. Go here for Part 1, Part 2)

The Overcommunication Problem

Do you ever suffer from facting-at-the-mouth? You're having a normal sort of conversation with someone, could be a long-time friend or a new acquaintance, and suddenly an issue comes up you're interested in and, often mostly unbeknownst to yourself, suddenly from your mouth begins to issue forth a rich and dense thunderhead of information regarding that topic, with possible lightning-strike tangents to related ideas.

This is perfectly acceptable to nearly any fellow INTP, as we love a good tempest of information (very different from "brainstorming," which is sometimes difficult to endure), but I have discovered that other people do not communicate in this way. Some of them even have a fairly strong aversion to it.

As I brought up in a previous post, people talk, and argue, for different reasons. Some of them find the process mildly stimulating regardless of whether the sounds coming out are actually conveying any thoughts or sentiments they'll remember 10 minutes later. For an INTP who has not created some kind of mental subprocess which can keep this going while their brain stays in a safe place, this kind of discussion can be like torture. Imagine someone cooking, not to make food anyone is going to eat, but just because they enjoy pouring things in bowls and mixing them around, and it's all going to be tossed out when they get tired of it, and that this requires at least two people and they can sort of drag other people into this process in such a way that it's rude to decline.

But INTPs can do a much more wearying version of this. We don't realize it, because speech for us is among other things a fairly efficient (given the options at our disposal) method of communicating ideas back and forth rapidly, and that's what we like to use it to do. If we could legibly write on sheets of paper much faster than we could speak, you would occasionally see two INTPs sitting beside each other with legal pads, scribbling furiously and nodding.

What we do is this: once a normal, unsuspecting person brings up a topic that interests us, we lock into the conversation with laser-like focus and begin trying to upload information verbally to their brain in order to have the necessary relevant data in each other's RAM to be able to analyze it productively. We expect the other person to be doing this too, of course, since it's possible they have picked up some info we managed to somehow overlook, and so their look of slight alarm and/or physically observable attempt to back out of the conversation is confusing because that's signalling the opposite of the intense exchange of ideas we're revving up for.


To reverse the cooking analogy earlier, imagine someone suggests making pizza and you enthusiastically agree, then begin clearing out a space beside the back door and hauling in bricks. When they ask you confusedly what you are doing, you also respond confusedly.
You: "Building a pizza oven, of course. Didn't we say we wanted to have pizza?"
Them: "Oh. Uh... we're just sending Rachel to the store for frozen pizza crust. Which brand of canned tomato sauce do you like?"
You (Frustrated at yourself for misreading the situation and at them for rejecting your idea which would have resulted in a superior outcome, in this case much tastier pizza, you speak too quickly and don't really mean it the way it comes across): "Oh sorry, I thought we were having real pizza. Well if not then it doesn't really matter which sauce you pick, anything's fine with me."
(Awkwardness ensues.)

When you're used to doing things very thoroughly, that's what feels rewarding and satisfying, but a lot of people find it "too much." That can be what conversations are like for INTPs. We want completeness and a comprehensive "theory of everything" approach, or at least a theory which fits into our personal theory of everything. Sometimes that comes out in how we talk about anything. Laying all the groundwork like that is practically a parenthetical statement for us, and one that is sometimes not even necessary if the other person is tracking with us, but it can be baffling and tiresome to someone who didn't intend to club the issue over the head and dissect it right there on the table beside the coffee machine. They were just making conversation until the coffee was ready. To them, the interaction might seem a little like this... (Bill Murray in this case actually muttering the things an INTP might uncharitably be thinking)

Bill Murray is being a jerk in that clip, and sometimes people do put down INTPs fact-vomit tendencies to negative motivations, thinking we want to show off, or impress them with how smart we are. It's a reaction with which I became quite familiar, growing up, and adults are sometimes no different. But while sinful people will have sinful motivations, mainly we talk like that because we think everything is really interesting. If your brain kept shooting off on tangents while other people were talking, and you thought all of them were really fascinating, you might talk similarly. It's like ADD of the mind's association matrix. In response to the idea of "tea," say, my brain might go down any of a number of paths:

Tea -> Drinking Tea -> Calmness -> Serenity -> Firefly -> Joss Whedon -> Whedon's ability to realistically portray characters with religion despite his own atheism
|
Green Tea -> Oolong Tea -> Taiwan High Mountain Tea -> Nantou -> '99 Earthquake -> That mountain with the whole side missing that I saw on my trip to visit my friend and we also went to this cool aviary
|
Matcha -> More caffeine than coffee -> coffee caffeine content -> espresso -> The time that I was in the airport in North Carolina and at Starbucks I ordered a Doppio Espresso and the guy pronounced it with an incredibly strong accent and it was funny but I was worried it might be pretentious to think so
|
Matcha Pocky -> Pocky -> That guy in Fast and the Furious 3 Tokyo Drift was holding a stick of Pocky in his mouth and not eating it -> I can never manage to do that for more than a few seconds -> I should be more disciplined -> I didn't do pushups today
|
Japanese Snacks -> Octopus balls -> Danshui Taiwan -> Bitan is at the opposite end of the Taipei metro from Danshui as I was saying to someone a couple days ago but it's rarely visited because fewer people know about it, but it would be a good place for short-termers to visit for a more relaxing experience of Taiwan

So my coworker might still be in the process of pouring some tea, and I have now decided I will see if our incoming short-termers this summer want to visit Bitan. I might introduce it as if it's a new topic I just remembered I wanted to mention. In particularly irritating INTP mode (one that I try to suppress or train myself out of, conversationally), my brain might insist it wants to discuss Joss Whedon's ability to write characters with religious beliefs well despite his own atheism, and if I don't stop myself I might automatically begin working the conversation down the path my brain took to get there from tea. Maybe that's not an INTP thing but my own particular weirdness, but it's something nowadays I can usually stop myself from doing. (harder to stop in Chinese, however, because I have less control over observing what I say, because most of my mental effort is going into saying it correctly)

This is why it was hard to pay attention in class. Or not fact-dump in conversations.
And it's especially hard not to do this when people are praying in my second language...

Now, occasionally someone does want more information on a certain topic, and they might actually seek INTPs out in that situation. We -like- to have our brains picked, and I suspect (it's true for me, at least) we don't care so much whether someone profits from using that information for their own purposes. We're not in it for the money, we're trying to construct a model of the universe in our heads, and by consulting us and then acting on that information you're basically buying into our model. This both validates us and our carefully constructed views, and also means we are influencing the world of ideas, which is the kind of influence that matters to us. Anyone can win the lottery and have money, but explaining a system to an interested person and seeing the light go on over their head, or overhearing someone telling someone else an idea that you originally told them, in a way that demonstrates it's already become part of their own world view, that's the sort of thing that gives us the warm fuzzies. (That no one else believes we are capable of experiencing)

Being Misunderstood

All this leads to a very common phenomenon among INTPs: feeling misunderstood.
I was once talking with a girl I was interested in, and the topic of pets came up. She said she couldn't imagine me having a pet unless it was a snake, or maybe a robot. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, things with her went nowhere, but did result in a pretty cool trip to Mexico)

I was a bit surprised at that response, in that I didn't think I came across to people that cold-bloodedly, but then I am surprised at least half the time I hear other people's descriptions of me, because none of it usually sounds like how I think of myself.

That in itself is probably quite common ("O, wad some Power the giftie gie us, to see oursels as others see us!"), but INTPs may specifically suffer from the feeling of not being understood and the wish or desire that this could be different. The problem for us, I think, is twofold:

1. As described above, we don't communicate normally (whatever that means).

It's hard for other people to get to know us, a fact very commonly mentioned in descriptions of INTPs. I suppose that because it's hard for us to let them. We bring up abstract topics and give them a thorough scrutiny and talking-over, and that's conversation for us. I don't really know how to talk about "myself," and am not much more able to talk to other people about themselves either.

As an example: Though I think I've improved over the past few years, when someone tells me they are sad, there is always that temptation to begin talking about sadness, as a concept. Sometimes the best I can do instead is to approach the conversation as discussing the topic of "sadness as it relates to [other party in conversation]". Since this involves talking through it (being P and not J, we're less likely to offer any sort of direct or implied judgement regarding the cause or appropriateness of their sadness), sometimes the other person may even find the conversation helpful and feel better afterwards. If I can succeed in not actually saying all the stuff my brain is writing into the conversational prompt regarding all the ideas that branch forth from what the other person is saying, it's not unusual to be told I'm a good listener.

2. Our whole approach to life is centered around understanding.

For an INTP, understanding is an endless quest. We want to know everything and why it ticks, and how it relates to everything else. We want to understand other people too, and sometimes can do surprisingly well at this along certain lines, since knowing someone for a while lets us build a sort of behavioral model for them, and that information goes into how we do this for other people too, so we can get quicker and more accurate at it as we go along, if we keep training in the discipline of actively engaging with various kinds of people. I'm thinking that a wise, old INTP would be an excellent judge of human character, because he's had a lifetime of observing people and building a mental model of their behavior, what different sorts of people are like and what they tend to do and how they react to things.

Because of our deep desire to know, we also have a deeper than usual desire to be known. The unknowability of our personality then presents a big problem, since we find it hard to let people know us yet desire greatly that they should. Those people who are willing to put forth the effort to get past our barriers and know us well are often rewarded with our devotion and gratitude, though in their child-like intensity these can be burdensome as well, depending on the depth of relationship desired. It must be admitted that a sense of proportion is not really one of our strongest features...

In Cross-Cultural Ministry

Setting aside all the accusations that the Myers-Briggs types are invalid to begin with, which I don't find to be the case, as if nothing else it's a heuristical model of considerable value, there is the fascinating question of whether the Meyer-Briggs scale can be applied across very different cultures. Their own info on that is here, but it's minimal, and the question is one I'd like to revisit in a future post.

Since an INTP on the mission field is probably immersed in a different culture and different language, the chances of being understood are even less likely. And in terms of meeting like-minded people, God can bring anyone into our lives according to His timing (something that happens all the time here), but by default INTPs are probably not the local people you're going to run into, except possibly as your language instructor. And given their conversational propensities, if they don't already speak English you're going to need a lot of language ability to talk with them. Depending on their level of introversion, INTPs are not necessarily going to rush to meet a foreign face either, though they may proactively make your acquaintance if they have good English themselves and you're a chance to practice it.

There's also the issue of coworkers. Feeling your national coworkers or local ministry partners don't understand you is natural, given the cultural and language gaps that probably exist. I probably seem entirely rational half the time and totally inexplicable the other half, to them, though as my Chinese ability has increased I've been able to do some of the "looking at it from my perspective, it's similar to how a Taiwanese person would feel about X" explanations which have helped, or at least moved things a bit closer to the recognition that Westerners are not mysterious entities who do strange things for our own incomprehensible purposes and can only be reacted to, not understood.

But your Western coworkers are another matter, because we expect them to "get" us, since by comparison we all seem more like to each other than like our target culture. That expectation can lead to a whole range of problems, however, since even in the same national culture there are widely different regional cultures (it's likely that someone on a team from Maine and someone from Texas will have to be working across fairly significant cultural gaps), and also it doesn't account for personalities. I've been told repeatedly by experienced missionaries that some of the greatest difficulties encountered by missionaries are conflicts with fellow missionaries. It hasn't happened yet, but I am led to understand it probably will. (A bridge that can be crossed in as Christ-like a manner as possible when I come to it)

It's certainly possible you will have a team leader who is brisk, brusque, and who sees your objections or analytical comments as not contributing to the discussion or getting anything done, and shuts you down. Or, your team leader may be sensitive and empathetic, and resist the "negativity" that involves rejecting any ideas or making anyone feel left out of the conversation. Either one can be frustrating, but cross-cultural ministry offers even fewer opportunities to pick your own coworkers.

So it's important to realize at the outset that you are probably not going to be understood, and frankly it's likely that most people place a lower priority on the whole concept than you do. So a big part of INTPs coping with cross cultural missions is something I've mentioned before, simply growing thicker skin and dealing with it.

However...

It doesn't actually matter. People won't understand the weird way your brain works, or why you can talk for hours with some people and only have short, awkward exchanges with others. But your intense need to be understood is already fulfilled, by a God who created you, and understands you better than you understand yourself. It may sound like I suddenly shifted into Sunday school mode, but I haven't. Because within the realization that God knows you better than you know yourself lies a key to overcoming a significant weakness of the INTP personality.

Jesus did not say the greatest commandment is "Know Thyself." (That's not even from the Bible, in case anyone was confused, and it predates the Latin version -referenced for example in The Matrix- being from an ancient Greek sage whose precise identity is unknown. See! That's what we do. That's a miniature example of what I'm talking about at the beginning.)

Jesus did say, however, that we were to love God, love others, and make disciples of all nations. The Bible is essentially a primer, compiled across various authors, genres, and centuries, that tells you who God is, and what He wants us to do in this life. So:

A. God knows us better than we know ourselves
B. He commands us not first to know ourselves, but to know and love Him, and love others
C. In following His commands, we will in the process find the fulfillment we sought in wanting to be known.

This is true for a reason I mentioned in a previous post. INTPs often play by the rules of reasonableness and logic, but aren't aware that there are social rules which aren't in the guidebook that came with our personality. The same is true of Scripture: God doesn't answer us according to the varying ways we seek fulfillment (ways that differ by personality type, among other things), He commands us according to our nature, and as we follow Him we find our fulfillment.

In our tight circle of logic, we come to the end of ourselves. In following what seems natural and instinctive for our personality, we eventually run into a dead end, because Eastern philosophy is wrong, the answers are not inside us, the answers come in following the God who created us and knows how we "tick," and knows that what while we have X, and Y, and are naturally (and logically, but based on our limited information) seeking Z to fulfill ourselves, what we actually need is Blue, or 2, or Circle. We need something from outside ourselves, something we couldn't arrive at or guess through our own efforts, even the powerful analytical and intuitive efforts of which INTPs are so capable.

So when we stop trying to find fulfillment through being understood, and depend on God to love Himself and love people (not something we can succeed in doing by trying under our own power), we find several things happen:

1. We stop caring so much about being understood, about receiving the understanding of others, yet discover our drive to understand can aid us greatly in serving God. Our personality comes from God too, and is a gift from Him to serve Him in our particular way; it is only the defects that are from sin. Solving the defects cannot be done by means of the particularities of our personality but by turning to the God from whom our personality is derived.

And actually when under conviction, we find that being understood is terrifying: the truth is far worse than we feared. We wish God might not know us so closely, see weaknesses and evil we haven't even uncovered yet. The bad news is that we are perfectly known by infinite Goodness, and that damns us to hell because we are not Good. The good news is that there is one man, Christ, who is Good, because He is God who is Good, and if we ally ourselves with Him, His goodness will count for us too.

2. The trap of introspection grows weaker the more time we spend outwardly focused. The melancholia, self doubt, and recursively negative introspection that often accompany the INTP personality type are difficult to shake because they trap us into trying to get to the end of them, whereas they are actually endless. I tried for years; it ended in total despair, and damage to my psyche or whatever that part of me should be called which I'm still recovering from now. Simply having your mind fully occupied with something that doesn't leave you processing cycles to get sucked back into the Darkening Corridor may only be a temporary solution (sometimes temporary relief is enough), but the more you do it, the more you'll find your mind can stay in the sun.

3. When the black hole of nihilism is filled with God's infinity, it overflows. That God's love is infinite rolls off the tongue nicely in a praise song, but think about what we're saying. There is a black hole at the center of our being, that abyss into which unredeemed men dare not look, from which they distract themselves with everything from TV to building empires. When we surrender to God and enter His kingdom, that hole of endless Nothing becomes filled with Himself, and He is more Something than the Nothing is Nothing. He can overcome it, He can fill the black hole up, break back across the event horizon, and pour out into the universe unstoppably. That's what He does in our souls.

What is the opposite of a black hole?

The transformation can be even more obvious in an INTP because we feel the gravitational pull of that black hole very strongly. We construct our vast and sturdy array of logic to withstand it, and logic is very strong. It is the wisdom from which the world was created. But one tiny error, one imperfection, -inevitable, due to our humanity- and the weak link will begin a chain of failures, the girders of reason warping under the strain, and the whole thing comes crashing down like a house of cards. It can be rebuilt in our minds over and over; we are made in the image of God. But it is never sufficient.

Christ does not withstand the black hole's gravity with His strength, He fills it up. It stops sucking in the light and begins flowing forth with it, becomes an every-dimensional fountain, like our souls do when filled with Him. We are changed; the dry stubble of our souls becomes the bush in the desert- a vessel for the holy fire which though it burns does not consume, but brings life. Embrace God, and surrender to Him. If you struggle with the inner darkness, ask the Light of the World for help. And to those caught in the icy shroud of depression He can send His holy fire. He did it for me. The solution to the deepest and darkest problems of the INTP soul is not a perfect syllogism, but the very presence of God.

And so was the plight of man for generations.
Their souls remained frozen.
Enslaved in darkness.
Until the day that fire fell from Heaven.

"Fire Made Flesh" - Becoming the Archetype

INTPs and Music

(This is Part 2 in my current series on INTPs and Christian ministry. Go here for Part 1.)

Intro (Important)

In some ways it's difficult to even write about music for me, rather like a bird trying to write about air density. I can't speak for all INTPs, but I suspect we have much of what I will share in common.

1. I should note here at the beginning that when I say "music" I mean 1) the music itself. Lyrics are another thing, which I'll mention if relevant. Depending on the song, they might "join with" the music to produce the effects I'll describe later, or they may stand apart from and be separable from it. 2) Not: this artist and that artist. To me that's like thinking about auto parts primarily according to which company makes them versus what they do in your car. ("I need to repair something on my car." "Ok, do you want a Nissan part, or a Honda part, or..?")

2. Another very important fact starting out is that INTPs, stereotyped as creatures of soulless (and tactless) logic, experience what I'd call the "revenge of the feelings." We don't "speak the language of emotion" well at all. (Being a guy this is more or less expected; I imagine it's more difficult for women) That's great when dispassionately analyzing something, or when having an argument where you find it easy to stay icy cool and the other person gets all blustery. But when the feelings do pop up, whether positive or negative, they tend to surge strongly and unstably and we don't know what to do with them. (This theory suggests that's the norm for INTPs, and that one of the reasons we're so skilled at rational thinking is that we had to become so, to reign in our own dialed-too-high emotions. The description is a little more exaggerated than my personal experience but some good stuff over there) INTPs can get a bit odd during these times. It's like we're intensely focused on reading an eyechart and then someone throws a bucket of blue paint on it. "T... Q... P... Blue. Blue. Blue? Blue!? *sigh* Blue... Blue everything."

As linked above, the INTPexperience website posits that it's not that we're robots
it's that we feel things too strongly and have to learn how to keep control with reason
It's an interesting chicken-and-egg problem, at least

So when I talk about "feelings" in this post, understand that's where we're coming from. Not because we're delicate snowflakes, but because finding quick and effective ways of dealing with unpredictable, disruptive feelings is an important issue for INTPs, and Music is probably our primary ally in this struggle.

Music: Some Personal Background

For INTPs, including myself, music is much more than just "something to listen to," something to provide a low level of mental stimulation to help alleviate boredom. (Even less is it primarily a background track for me to express myself by singing over) Rather, music itself and the act/process of listening to it is a primary and necessary means of self-expression. Sometimes it feels inseparable from the act of being conscious of the persistence of my own existence.

Thanks to parents who had me take lessons, I have played piano since childhood (I can read music, but rely more on my natural ability to play by ear). I actually play rather poorly, because I am doing too many things at any given time in my life to devote a lot of time to practicing. (And I tend to move on when I have a certain song down about 90%, which doesn't work when playing for other people) I realized years ago, however, that there was a strange paradox in my piano abilities. Ask me to play in a church service next Sunday for people to sing along and I will break out in cold sweat. I can possibly get through it without any mistakes, but it's extremely mentally taxing and requires disproportionate amounts of practicing beforehand. That kind of playing comes from a different place in my brain, one that is not very skilled. I can and have improved it by practice in the past, but the stress involved is worse than that of public speaking.

On the other hand, if I am improvising, I could go for half an hour regardless of whoever might be listening, easily weaving in chunks of those songs I am all but unable to perform "as written" if ordered to. Indeed, much of my problem with trying to perform music from rote memory is that my brain is constantly trying to be in improvisation mode instead, so it's almost impossible to just play what's on the sheet, which is what most people want from a non-professional musician. It seems that music performed as "rote" is weirdly difficult and stressful for me, like pushing against a mental block, but music that flows out naturally is not stressful at all, and people do seem to enjoy listening to the result.

Moving to Taiwan this time, I found myself initially living for several months without a piano. This was very difficult, because it meant one of my primary (as an INTP, there aren't many) means of emotional catharsis was denied to me. Yes I could listen to music, but I needed an outlet, a way to draw out the turbulence building inside as the pressure of a host of new cultural and social experiences mounted. Some people have very natural ways to let out this kind of emotional stress, but INTPs are not so fortunate, we need aids of some kind. When I recognize my emotional state is becoming noticeably disordered, sometimes I need to go hide and play whatever comes into my head for an hour, and though I don't understand how the process works, by the end I feel better. It's the musical equivalent of walking it off.

Now I am sure there are INTPs much more disciplined than me who have spent the necessary time to better train themselves to pour their musical self-expression into songs they have memorized and play according to the sheet. (Though it does seem the "too many irons in the fire to focus on one" problem is pretty common for INTPs)

But in general I am given to understand that a peculiarity of INTPs is that for us music is not something primarily external but reflective of our own inner emotional state. It's a means of sympathetically connecting with our own isolated Fe, perhaps because it entirely skips over the "does not compute" roadblock that INTPs encounter when trying to process their emotions and simply accesses those emotions directly. It is perhaps rather like someone asking an awkward person who actually does want/need to be hugged if they want a hug: if it depends on them, due to their awkwardness the hug is not likely to happen even though they want it, whereas just hugging them proactively would solve the problem.

Music itself does not ask permission to do what it does, it just rushes through the subterranean tunnels of our auditory nerves and pops up into the otherwise-heavily-guarded innermost parts of our minds and hugs us (or encourages us, or motivates us, or irritates us, or sedates us, or yells "on your feet, boy!" like a drill sergeant, or dances us down wet city streets under luminescent globes of multicolored light, or lures us out to bleak paths of monochromic solitude) without asking. That's the delight and beauty and usefulness and danger of it.

In case you were worried, yes I did solve my piano problem

"Existential resonance" and the Usefulness of Music

Music is a vital part of self expression for a INTP, but it's more than that, and I don't mean that in a "music is totally a huge part of my life" way. Our relationship with music is two-fold: we use music as a tool to efficiently manipulate or regulate our emotional/mental state, and also to reflect or express it, as a means to embody those difficult-to-analyze feelings so we can get a better look at them.

For example, we might wonder how to explain, say, "What it felt like on Monday morning at 7:10AM when I went out to my car and after several days of rain the air had been washed clean and now the morning sky was perfectly blue and I was aware of the rush of a sensation that an eternity of potential lay ahead into which I was constantly moving and for a moment I felt deeply alive and joyful at being so" using human language. A smell-memory might come close, but those tend to be narrower in scope. One is left using words to describe it, as I just have, and hope to evoke similar emotions in someone else. A good painting or well-taken photo might be able to do it as well, though visual art tends to be even more subjective.

But for me, the song Cyberbird is what represents and evokes that complicated and very specific emotional state fairly precisely. So if I perceive on a given day that I am feeling lethargic and melancholy and would benefit from feeling more like what that song represents for me, I might listen to that track. (If you follow the link you'll notice that the song is not in English. That's more or less irrelevant for what I'm describing, if anything it helps; lyrics you understand can be distracting. [Question for INTPs: Do you find yourself often listening to music with lyrics in languages you don't understand? That's never bothered me] Also, recognize that watching the video will influence the impression you get from the song, but listening to the song alone, you might be able to get a little of the impression I described)

This is what I mean by music being "useful" for INTPs. We use it music in an intentional way to achieve desired emotional states, and I am willing to bet good money that every INTP with access to the internet has a rich and complex mental -and probably also digital- set of playlists of songs which apply to different situations and can be used to push emotions in the desired direction. (For my readers: I would actually really like to hear some examples of what yours are, if you would be kind enough to share them below)

Of course everyone does this to some extent; there's a reason we have "workout mixes" or "pop hits from the X'ies." We all know music can evoke certain feelings in us; INTPs have just gotten this phenomenon down to a science and turned it up to 11, as it were. Rather than "energetic" or "calm" I have certain tracks for "that comfortable feeling of mental alacrity after sundown" or "pivoting away from melancholia to the warmth of a lonely sun-washed beach in a place I've never been before" or "wandering Taipei at night between the time the restaurants close and the subway stops running" I doubt we're the only ones who do this, but it seems consistent across the personality type.

In manipulating your own mental state you can only force it so far, of course; there has to be correspondence/resonance with your external state to achieve the desired effect on the internal state. So, say, I want to feel less sorrowful about something bad that has happened but it's a rainy night and no friends are available to talk to. Certain jazz tracks work perfectly for this, because they mesh perfectly with the current "noir-ish" external state but jazz tends to shortcircuit sorrowful feelings for me because it doesn't resolve, just like the sorrow is like a failure of life to "resolve" successfully, so there is catharsis.

I may still be sad about what happened -I may even want to be, as sadness is an appropriate and healthy response to tragedy- but my mood will have leveled out some, the overwhelming "spike" that INTPs experience blunted. It's too much of a stretch to try to feel "happy" immediately, but hey, I'm an INTP so I don't expect that anyway. After a couple of the right tracks (I know more or less which ones I'd play) I'll probably feel balanced and regain my mental equanimity. If I'm feeling inventive or the situation calls for it, I can carefully work my way from one emotion to a very opposite one with the right playlist.

Music is not merely about our mood or mental state, however, but provides a kind of window even deeper into the nature of being and reality. Perhaps the closest an INTP comes to experiencing timeless joy outside of the overwhelming presence of God Himself is when both of those processes -music influencing our mental state and also embodying it for us- fuse together and provide a sort of existential resonance, where the music perfectly syncs up with reality as we experience it and becomes the language, or perhaps the reflected shadow of the language, in which the persistence of our being is written.

In a sense it is like, maybe, how we are rarely aware of the existence of air around us, and may have trouble conceiving of ourselves as constantly living, moving through, and breathing a mix of gases (not so hard to recognize in Taiwan, thanks to super-humidity). But when a breeze is blowing just right, you can feel the air moving around you. Music is like that. Music captures passage through time in a form you can hear, but experience more deeply than that, so you are aware of time flowing around the fact of your continued existence, like a fixed needle testifies to the persistent existence of a turning record on the turntable by the ongoing stream of music it produces.

As a limited example of the experiential side to this, it might be helpful to think of a movie. While it would be silly to suggest the characters in the film could hear the soundtrack itself (that's what we call "breaking the fourth wall"), as the audience we experience the film holistically, and the music is an integral part of what's happening, maybe even subconsciously. (We "notice" the music but we don't usually give active thought to it when our attention is engaged by the film, it's just "persuading" us to feel a certain way about what we're watching happen)

For me, life is experienced both as an active participant and on (at least a couple) higher levels of mental abstraction as a spectator, so when I actively choose to listen to a given song at a given time, to some degree I'm intentionally providing a soundtrack for the movie of my life that I'm also watching. There are times when I start to listen to a song and think "no, this doesn't work for Now," (using our analogy, it isn't the right soundtrack for this part of the movie) and I change it. But "Now" really represents both my external state (experienced weather, time of day, what I'm doing, location, what I can see around me, etc) and my internal state (excited, weary, ticked off, depressed...), and when chosen properly, music can become the perfect expression of the ongoing interaction between the internal and external states.

Music and Ministry for INTPs

So after all this you may be wondering where the ministry connection might be. (Actually if you are an INTP you may have been wholly occupied in comparing and contrasting my own perspective on music to your own and developing a potential explanation for the source of any discrepancies)

I hope the ramifications of what we discussed above are pretty obvious as pertains to our personal lives, which are intimately and inextricably linked to any ministry we set out to do. Of course, music may play a more direct role in your ministry as well. Either way, there are several applications for believers, and for those of us in ministry or considering it:

1. Filter. The first point is simple; anything which affects us so deeply, which grabs and holds our attention as spiritual beings and even resonates with ongoing reality as we experience it, is something that as believers we have to be careful about.
All music contains implicit propositions, assertions made by the form of its composition, and we need to be aware of what they're suggesting to our minds. This is entirely apart from the explicit propositions made by lyrics which may be present. Both are important, and both need to be payed attention to, as there is a cost to letting in too much unhealthy content- GIGO: Garbage in, Garbage out, as they taught us in computer engineering school.
I am going to guess that most Christian INTPs don't have problems with listening to all different kinds of music; we're curious, have very wide-ranging interests, and are mostly cognizant of the message of what we're listening to, and can make the distinction. But while I personally would never presume to do the job that Paul clearly leaves up to us as individual Christians with our own discernment about what is profitable and right according to our own consciences, it's obvious that we can't be prideful either; there are limits to how effectively the human mind can block influences when we choose to immerse ourselves in them. We are probably not as immune as we imagine ourselves to be. I'm merely advising caution.


2A. Observe your tendencies. Since INTPs often listen to music which reflects their internal state, the music you find yourself drawn to is a reasonably helpful indicator of your spiritual state as well. So while there is a lot of music that is more or less "neutral," (How do you categorize the Blue Man Group?) if you never find yourself naturally drawn to praise or worship music, songs that explicitly honor God, it doesn't mean you're an apostate, but it might be something to consider, a reminder to reexamine yourself spiritually.
I certainly have songs that remind me of scriptural truths and attributes of God that it's safe to say the writer/composer never intended, but to make these the entirety of one's spiritual music diet would be like only reading books about scripture and never scripture itself.

2B. Instruct your habits. By the same token, since music affects us as spiritual creatures and INTPs have often mastered the art of selecting music based on how it affects them, it only makes sense (indeed, in some sense it is our spiritual duty) to intentionally fill some of our music consumption time with music that points us to God. If we can lift our mood from ourselves to consider Christ and the nature of the God we serve and love by listening to music composed for that purpose, we certainly should be making a habit of it. I am guilty of not always being as intentional about this as I should.

3. Let the Music Testify. If we consider ourselves to be more aware than most of the power of music, we should be making full use of it as we serve God in our ministries. It's easy to see how much the right music changes the mood of an event, and so we might put more effort into doing this intentionally. Lots of people know there should be music of some kind, but I suspect few will have put as much thought into what music might suit a particular situation as INTPs will often have. (Note: Just don't be surprised or offended if ministry coworkers reject your suggestions and put on whatever music they always do because they personally like the familiarity of it and aren't thinking in terms of what mood it might or might not give to the event as perceived by those attending. Not everyone thinks in those terms. Just be patient and be willing to accept the fact that your choices might indeed not give everyone else the impression they give you personally.)

Some might ask, isn't choosing music to produce a desired mood "brain-washing" or "emotional manipulation"? It all depends on your motive. Are you trying to trick someone into doing something they wouldn't normally do? Do you believe anyone can be convinced into truly accepting the gospel simply by you creating the right atmosphere? I hope not. Yes some churches do intentionally try to use music for emotional manipulation, sadly, and all I can say is either they are foolish to think they can use man's intelligence to use tricks to accomplish what only the power of God can, or else they are wolves in sheep's clothing whose punishment will be justifiably severe.

But I certainly don't think inviting someone to your home to share the gospel with them means you have to serve bad-tasting food for fear that delicious food would be a kind of manipulation. Good music is something we enjoy as the Church. Martin Luther reportedly asked why the devil should have all the good music, and I am pleased to report that he does not, even in what some like to call his particular style of music. And much of the world's good music came out of Christianity one way or another, so there's no reason not to use it as a testimony. So bring on the pipe organs of cathedrals and the cute kids with plastic ukuleles and everything in between, and let them hear our God is worthy to be praised with skillfully played music.
(Yes, Christian pop radio stations, I said skillfully played)

About those plastic ukuleles... I was speaking from experience.

Summary

Music is a powerful drug, they say. In that context, INTPs are like pharmacists, who can self-administer with the right medications and doses to keep a healthy mental state. The "dark side" of this would be INTPs who purposefully misuse those drugs. You can mess yourself up with music too. But be aware of the power and potential of music, and it can not only transport you to other worlds, but anchor you more firmly in this one and redirect your gaze from the trap of endless introspection outward to reality as it passes by, moment by moment, opportunity by opportunity, the only place where we can serve God and proclaim His gospel.

The "Courage" of Bruce Jenner

Pain on Display

I have noticed something about what people post on Facebook. Every so often, some people will post a status that is basically a cry for help: "I can't handle this situation." "Please pray for me, today was really horrible." "I don't know what to do."

This kind of status is not all that common (compared to say, pictures of food) not because people don't have problems all the time, but because most people have to arrive at a place of particular pain, emotional discomfort, or desperation, before they are willing to "go public" in this way. Some people might be dealing with even greater problems, but feel they have enough resources to handle it, or simply have the kind of personality that hides the pain instead of seeking the comfort of others. They don't want to announce it to hundreds or thousands of people on a social media site.

I neither condemn nor approve of this practice; I did it pretty often in darker, younger days, and tend not to share so much now. It's not that millennials aren't tough enough to be the strong, silent type, it's that the social conditions which produced strong silent types are much less in play in 2015. We share our lives online, and that means sometimes sharing the pain too. Being strong is great, even in a time when weakness has never been more celebrated, but being silent just means you are not participating in what has become an integral part of life for developed-world internet generation kids. (Every age has its benefits and drawbacks. One day the value of silence will be rediscovered too.)

So the sharing itself is not the problem; it's a method or channel for communicating the pain someone is dealing with, a kind of pressure valve. But the more the pain, the longer it hurts, the more desperation creeps in, the less anyone cares what other people think. The pain longs to be expressed. It can't be held inside forever. It breaks out and becomes obvious to everyone.

What Courage is Not

Bruce Jenner's very public act of doctor-assisted self-mutilation (regardless of what you think about his "true identity," physically speaking that is what occurred), is being presented, even awarded, as an act of great courage. Not caring what anyone thinks, the story goes, he (My pronouns are chosen in light of genetic realities) was willing to do something still considered extremely outre, making a spectacle of himself and being held up in many cases to derision and the ogling of the general public, in order to be "true to himself/herself," and in doing so is held up as an example. I imagine some parallels to the courage required to "come out" as homosexual (into a society where lgbtetc people currently enjoy most-favored status and can shut down businesses for not recognizing that) are in play here.

The most consistent online reaction to this idea, and to the idea of his being presented with an ESPN courage award, was the sarcastic comparison of his act with soldiers of the US military, many displaying the wounds and disfigurements they have received in the line of duty. The implication is that this, by contrast, is what true courage looks like. My Facebook feed was half-filled with this kind of post for a few days.

I want to suggest this is not a very effective reply (not addressing the real issue, anyway). We all know, I think, that there are different kinds of courage. Yes, our soldiers are an excellent example of one kind, really a collection of different kinds of courage. But there are other kinds of courage, of course: a Muslim daughter's willingness to face her parents' wrath for accepting Christ; a young pianist getting up in front of everyone for a recital; someone suffering deep and damaging depression just deciding to get up and live another day. Robin Williams not killing himself; that would have been courage. To live would have been an awfully great adventure.

We do know this. And personally I don't doubt that what Jenner did involves some level of courage, though as I'll explain below I don't think that was the primary issue here. Courage is not a trait which bestows goodness or evil on those who exhibit it, it's simply a positive trait which we admire. However, if the person is clearly using their good courage to do evil, we no longer admire that in them. We may be tempted to say it's not courage at all, but give it other names, like madness. We call our friends "full of desperate courage" and our enemies "frenzied." They themselves would call it courage, of course, we just don't want to honor their motives by recognizing they too partake in common grace and can exhibit positive character traits, even while serving a cause we find repulsive.
(tl;dr- Some of the Nazis were brave too. Doesn't mean bravery is bad or they were good.)
 
So following the analogy C.S.Lewis uses at the beginning of Mere Christianity, courage is like a note on the piano, and our sense of morality tells us when to play it. To continue his analogy: we are tempted to call it the wrong note when we don't like the song, but in reality it was the same G we liked in Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, just serving another purpose.

What people are really saying, when they post those contrastive examples of soldiers, is that they feel the cause for which the soldiers exhibit courage and risk the consequences of physical mutilation (or even death) is Right and Just, and the cause for which Jenner exhibited courage (if it was courage, more on this below) and risked the consequences of his physical mutilation is wrong, weird, and sad. I think it would be more honest and courageous to just say this, rather than

It's not a question of courage. It's a question of what ideals courage should serve.

Despair and the Blade

That being said, I believe what motivated Jenner was not primarily courage. Going back the first section of this post, I believe the identity crisis and moral confusion raging inside him for years, and tendencies of which people around him were apparently aware, finally reached a head, and in despair he no longer cared what society's verdict might be. (Perhaps some interpret this as bravery because, lacking any received truth, what society's verdict might be is the final authority for them) That's not what courage is. Despair is not courage, it's the opposite of courage. Acting with courage is doing something despite the consequences; it's brave because you do actually care very much about those consequences and are willing to suffer them for a higher purpose. Acting in despair is doing something because you no longer care about those consequences.

There are those who would say I'm being too generous, and that the media circus and worldwide attention showered on Jenner is one of the reasons he did it. Maybe it's true; maybe the real battle was fought and lost many years ago, and this was a calculated decision to profit off the resulting debacle. It's impossible to know for sure. Whatever the case now, there must have been years of mental self-torment and deep delusion to even consider doing this. And the torment and the delusion have not been "resolved" with this act, but exacerbated. Letting the inner unwellness out only increases the totality of its bondage in the end; the chains of the mind are now engraved in the flesh.

Self-mutilating in an effort to force physical reality to reflect inner brokenness comes in many forms. Cutting, for example, is an epidemic which with nearly any Millennial is all too familiar. When it hurts too bad inside, many students are driven to hurt themselves on the outside too. Now imagine if, instead of trying to help those who cut and get them to stop, to bring healing to that brokenness, we glorified it. We celebrated it. We put scarred and bloodied wrists on the front page of newspapers, on the morning news, and proclaimed it a beautiful act of courage which should be praised and awarded. Wouldn't that be sick and twisted?

But that's exactly what is happening with Bruce Jenner. This is Cutting, taken from the wrists and extended as broad as the whole body and as deep as one's sexual identity. Slice it up to make the outside match the messed-up inside. But it won't stay feeling like that. There's a reason for the sky-high suicide rates after this kind of surgery. Yet we see that many of those with the authority and ability to do so are promoting this to the world's youth. Woe to them.

Sin is not a Choice

As distracting as the controversy him has become, Bruce Jenner is a symptom of a deeper problem. There is much we don't know about his motives, but the gender confusion with which he struggled would not even have to be his own choice to still be wrong; we live in a fallen and corrupted world. Flesh-eating bacteria don't ask permission to exist and wreak deadly havoc in your body, mental disorders don't ask permission to exist and corrupt your mind or psyche. Sin certainly doesn't ask permission to corrupt your soul, that's already the default state of mankind.

A particular sinful decision is a choice, but sin overall is no more a choice than being human is a choice; an unregenerated person can't refrain from sinning. That's what it means to be in bondage to sin. Sin is not freedom, it's an inescapable prison. The new life Jesus Christ offers is freedom from that prison, and friendship with Him. And who the Son has made free will be free indeed.

Bruce Jenner is not free, he is in total bondage to sin. He cannot escape by any effort of his own. That the expression of his sinful bondage is abnormal is itself not that strange. Sin breeds more sin, deeper corruption. We have simply arrived at the point in our culture where particularly unsettling forms of sin aren't being kept out of sight anymore.

It was inevitable that this would occur. Every nation, America at every point in history, every earthly culture, is entirely composed of sinful people. All cultures, all nations, eventually decline, decay, and fail. Nothing but the Kingdom of God, a kingdom not of this world, endures and remains unstained.

So if these damaged individuals were regarded as examples of unhealthy people especially needing love and patience and reinforcement of a Biblical idea of selfhood and identity in Christ, that would be the Church acting as it should. What we see in our society today, however, is a rush to exalt this deviance and praise the people who practice it. Let us not take our cues from them and think we need to fight over this issue with hopes of "retaking our culture." We never actually had it. It's pointless to try to fight a battle with society, since: 1) Society defines its values by common accord, so you will automatically lose by definition. 2) According to scripture this is the wrong battlefield. Society was a lost cause when Adam accepted the fruit from Eve. Christ will make all things new. Our job is not to make them look like that now, but to proclaim that fact. (And in doing so, some things will start to show signs of their future glorification even now)

So How Should We React?

 

One thing the Church must do, and only the Church can do, is to speak the revealed truth of God with the indwelling love of God. That means we very firmly reject the idea that what is wretchedly wrong can be called right, and that one man's confused self-nihilism should be put on display and celebrated as a model for others. At the same time, we must show sacrificial love, as Christ did. That means caring more and doing more for damaged souls than seems safe or prudent, while never legitimizing the damage itself.

If any condemnation is deserved -and indeed, the uncomfortable, twisted wrongness that is so obviously present in this situation does deserve and demand condemnation- let it be directed toward and fall on those who approve of this sin, promote it, and lead others into similar deception:

Woe to those who call evil good and good evil,
Who put darkness for light and light for darkness,
Who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!
(Isaiah 5:20)

The deceived will sin and certainly receive their due punishment, but it is the deceivers for whom scripture reserves special condemnation. It is from them that a love of deviance spreads through our society. We all have a sinful nature, but there are those who go further, who are described by Paul in Romans 1 as "those who invent new ways of doing evil," or those Jesus speaks of as leading children astray and for whom drowning is too soft a punishment. These people are not the misled sheep, but the misleading shepherds, themselves misled by their father, the Father of Lies.

A culture cannot be saved, only individual human souls. But if a reaction is proper, let us push back against those who are actively seeking to deceive, rather than giving in to kneejerk reactions against those who have been deceived by them. In recent years this is a typical trap set for the Church, and we have a bad habit of falling right into it. Make sure you are not simultaneously condemning those who are themselves partially victims and unwittingly supporting those who promote and push for acceptance of the lies in which an entire generation of youth are being daily saturated.

Instead, pray for those youth, disciple them and model Christ to them. (You yourself may be a youth, you can still do all of those things) Pray that God would give you wisdom in how to love sacrificially while also speaking truth and not condoning sin. And pray for Bruce Jenner. He is a soul God created, one that is wrong, confused, exploited, and statistically speaking may be on suicide watch soon. But imagine the witness he would have if he was delivered from his bondage to sin into the freedom of Christ and the light of truth.

It's time for the Church to once again fearlessly proclaim the grace and freedom and power of Christ into a world burdened with disorder, violence, and falsehood.

Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound
That saved a wretch... like me
I once was lost, but now am found
Was blind, but now I see

An INTP on the Mission Field: INTP Tips for Ministry Part 1

Well I haven't done an INTP-specific update in a while, so this should be fun.

For the next few posts I want to talk about some things I've learned as an INTP on the mission field. The lessons will apply more or less to anyone else too, of course, but if I seem to be really emphasizing things you don't feel are important, or skipping past things that seem vital, that would be why.

I do this partially because I've come to realize that there isn't a lot of material out there directed towards INTPs in ministry. Perhaps it's not a huge demographic; we're very much not people-people. As Quiet author Susan Cain pointed out, in modern churches we are often passed over for church ministry in favor of those with more enthusiastic temperaments.

It must be mentioned, however, that the problem is not necessarily a wave of INTP volunteers being turned down. We are not the most assertive bunch, and are all too likely to analyze the problems we can observe in a system (that system possibly being our local church) without having the social confidence or desire to work through a messy, people-oriented solution, which is typically the only available route to take in a local church context.

So I want to provide some tools or suggestions for INTPs who are interested in ministry, with hopes that a feeling of mental preparation will be conducive to some boldness in volunteering for the exhausting but Christ-mandated task of loving and serving God and people in this world, and even all the unreasonable people in it, which of course includes ourselves as well, if we're honest.

Where I Serve:
With regards to my own experience over the past 18 months, as an INTP doing full-time cross-cultural ministry, I feel very blessed in that Taiwan is not the hardest place to be an INTP.

1.  It's a place you can actually "be" in your field. Yes you will be a lifelong guest, no you will never "fit in," unless you are ethnically Chinese and successfully embrace a local identity, but at least you can actually establish a life here. Some career missionaries choose to retire here, for example, which would be more or less impossible in a lot of missions focus areas. It's not the same as those fields that require living on a compound and taking little trips "into the culture," guided by locals without whom you would be lost, a situation which does not at all allow for an INTP's insatiable curiosity to be appropriately fed by immersion in the new culture/situation.

2. It's a more introvert-friendly culture. I've blogged on this in the past. I didn't immediately realize why Taiwan "clicked" with me as a culture, but over the past couple of years I've realized it may have partially been that I subconsciously recognized the marks of a more introverted culture: attention to detail, appreciation of silence and peace, lots of people reading in public, etc. Sure, you have super extroverts here too, and yes, a hot, noisy, brightly-lit restaurant or night market packed with two hundred people shouting over each other can be a daunting prospect even on a non-socially-exhausted evening, but go around the corner or up the little stairs and you'll find a nearly silent bookshop or cafe full of people reading. (Reading physical books! Interestingly, despite everyone from kids to grandparents carrying high-powered smartphones, ebooks are not popular here)

Maybe it's just me. A lot of spaces here seem to have the "by introverts, for introverts" vibe

3. It's a non-stop learning situation. Taiwan is not so much a "ok, newbie, here's how things work here" culture. In fact rather the opposite; people's attempts to explain to you "how Taiwan is" may leave you scratching your head, because the last person to explain that exact same thing told you very differently. Essentially, it's a steep learning curve that never ends and only begins to taper after years of being here. Overwhelming and off-putting to some, but a gloriously stimulating situation for INTPs. (As long as we can get away and process.)
Due to Taiwan's complicated history with waves of migration, mountainous geography (leading to less homogenization of culture), and being a free and somewhat progressive democracy, there is much less of the "the nail that sticks out gets hammered down" phenomenon that one thinks of when generalizing Asian culture. It's true that the culture also does not demand that every student be a special and unique nail that sticks out, and would frown upon the notion, but by the same token, there is the feeling that everyone, at least every family, could have something to contribute, and society would be less rich and less bountiful if that was lost. And that's not even counting the enthusiasm for embracing outside ideas.

This leads to a veritable cornucopia of never-ending detail and variety. It's almost a tease: the desire of INTPs to achieve a comprehensive and predictive mental model of the system is frustrated by the sheer amount of systems stacked on top of each other. I haven't even started to gather enough information to put all the pieces together, and may never be able to.

All that being said, my first tip for INTPs doing ministry is one that contradicts the introspection and contemplation we naturally isolate ourselves to conduct. (It will, however, help in data accumulation):

INTP Tips for Cross-Cultural Ministry - Part 1:
Push Yourself to Find Friends who will Push You

Luxuries that missionaries (believers?) don't have...

An INTP naturally enjoys levels of isolation greater than the average person could handle. Being "alone with one's thoughts" is a fully engaging and stimulating situation for us. (That doesn't even count the existence of the internet, into which I'm convinced many INTPs could happily sink most of their life and not notice that much was missing, another danger to avoid)
Thus, it's easy to gravitate towards a low level of social interaction and stay comfortably there. And while a look at Christ's life reveals there is certainly spiritual value in silence and solitary meditation and prayer, most evangelical ministry inherently requires an amount of social commitment (as Christ's life also did. His balancing of these is our example to follow.). For cross-cultural ministry this is even more true. Culture = people, and to do something cross-culturally requires spending time with those people from another culture. So, put succinctly, a missionary's work is People. An inherently exhausting task, for me at least, but an utterly worthwhile one, since it's for the Kingdom of God.

What this means by extension, however, is that my desire to, perhaps, disappear for a week or so and finish my novel, (which would probably mean many hours of reading and fewer actual hours of writing), is something I'm simply not able to indulge. And if I find that I am able to indulge it, it means I have chosen a path of too much introverted comfort. I'm not pushing myself, and I may need to find some people who will.

This isn't business as usual; people are dying without saving knowledge of Christ. A truth about the gospel that very much meshes with the INTP outlook on life is this: we can't save anyone, or force them to make a decision; only God can open someone's heart, and draw people to Himself. But, something we can do is to make sure people hear the gospel communicated clearly. It is my desire that no one in Taiwan who hears the gospel from me will find it incomprehensible because I communicated it in a way that was culturally opaque, or not in accordance with the reality of their own life, and my hope that along the way I may discover insights which will benefit others trying to do gospel work here as well. So I observe and study Taiwanese culture and try to grasp a local worldview as much as possible, so that when I share the gospel, the stumbling block will be Christ Crucified, not an American way of explaining that makes no sense to people looking at the world from a very different angle. (And, I argue, increasingly less sense to most Americans either.)

The other side to this is that for INTPs, getting out of the house, or apartment, or wherever we consider the bounds of our little residence zone to lie, is a fairly big step. That sounds ridiculous to some people, so here's an analogy:

For INTPs, our entire adult lives are like waking up to a frosty winter morning in a house with a tile floor. The bed -our introverted comfort zone- is warm and comfortable, while the air is cold and the floor is freezing. (Music can be like warm slippers we can put on first, but more on that in a later post)

Yes, we have to leave it every day (typically), but getting out of bed -getting out of our comfort zone to go engage the world and meet people- involves that extra amount of reluctance to overcome, that bracing of effort to put your feet down on the freezing floor and get over that discomfort. When there's no pressing need, like keeping our job, we are just as happy living in the rich inner world inside our own minds.

Now you might be thinking/scoffing "Sheesh, get over yourself and just go do it." That may be valid, and something INTPs need to hear sometimes. But 1) we all have things we are reluctant to do. Maybe you are someone who leaps energetically from bed at the crack of dawn and looks forward to a packed day of social engagements, but I am not convinced there aren't other tasks, perhaps involving silence or isolation, that you won't balk at and delay if possible. And 2) that's precisely what I'm saying in this section. We need to get out there and do more, it's good for us as people, let alone necessary for productive ministry.
Now criticism is not a good way to accomplish this (for an INTP that's an invitation to battle, one we can typically "win" and thus lose), but invitations that are open-ended yet suggest our presence would be missed are a very good way. (Just the suggestion that my presence would be missed can brighten my day more than I like to admit, probably due to the fact that my subconscious is more or less continually telling me this isn't the case)

So, just as the kind of people who are easily influenced by the people around them have a greater need to pick their friends carefully, INTPs have a greater need to find friends who can proactively get them to do things. "Get out of your house, we're going hiking" is actually an invitation I'm quite happy to accept. It's an experience I will enjoy that I'd probably never have begun on my own initiative, or would have taken weeks to finally get around to doing. That's one of the single most frustrating things about the INTP temperament, in my opinion. We often greatly enjoy the things we get invited or even dragged into doing, but we seem to lack some kind of positive energy that would result in us doing them on our own initiative.

The problem is that we have trouble ever leaving this state
without outside intervention. Our default mode is introspection.

In order to balance this weakness, we need those friends who will seek us out, or who are aware of our potential for being too solitary and help us manage it. For missionaries, these friends could be of various kinds: friendships with local people -valuable for cross-cultural missionaries to cultivate for a plethora of reasons- expat friends, or other missionaries, though I think it's obviously best not to confine your socializing to other missionaries if your context doesn't restrict you to that. If you aren't out doing things with people on a regular basis,you are not engaging in the life-to-life interactions that result in Godly edification and chances for the Spirit to work through you in the lives of other people. What I'm describing here is a holistic approach to missions: you are not just employed at task A, you are a believer God has placed in a certain context. There is no clocking in and clocking out on being salt and light. I am convinced this is true of all believers, not just those called to be cross-cultural missionaries. If all your socializing is inside a church context, you're hiding your light under a bushel.

Now, it may be that your ministry doesn't even allow for the possibility of being a hermit; you are constantly immersed in ministry and exhausted by a steady stream of people with no obvious chance of escape. For an INTP, this is a dangerous situation which easily leads to burnout. Yes it's a weakness to be so easily overcome with social exhaustion compared to other people, but so is overconfidence or a tendency to lose one's temper. To some extent we can't help the weaknesses that come with our personalities, and there is certainly no benefit to ignoring them, but we can take steps to mitigate the damage.

I often compare myself to a machine with insufficient cooling mechanisms, like a motherboard with too few heat sinks. My temperature goes up too quickly under a heavy social load, and it takes me longer to cool down. I don't like that it's true, but it is, so I have to do my best to counteract that weakness in order to better serve the cause of Christ. In America I succeeded in building up my "social endurance" quite a bit, now in a new culture and very different context (and speaking a second language often considered one of the hardest to learn in the world, though personally I disagree with that assessment) I must endeavor to do the same. It's not easy, but with Christian brothers and sisters being decapitated in the Middle East as I write this, I would feel ashamed to suggest I've been asked to do anything especially difficult.

A Note on Burnout: If burnout really does seem imminent, there's no point in wasting time in recovery if it could be prevented. Sometimes we need to take five. However, INTPs are not good at expressing their needs and negotiating a solution because we overcommunicate and also seek perfect solutions.  So when stuck in a burnout situation, especially if other team members have more people-oriented personalities and don't understand, it may be wiser to explain the situation to someone empathetic enough to grasp the problem and have them explain it to the relevant people on your behalf.

Part 1 Summary

We have seen that INTPs have a tendency to default to solitude, and being introverts they will have varying but ultimately limited abilities to cope with social time burdens, because regardless of how friendly and cheerful they may be, they are drained by them and need alone time to recover.

We have also seen that one method to avoid this, and therefore a responsibility of INTPs in cross-cultural missions (or really any INTP believers, I'd argue), is to seek out and befriend people who will help keep them engaged and not let them isolate themselves in their preferred thought-cocoon for excessive periods of time. This may not always be an option, but it should be a goal for every INTP ministering in an unfamiliar context (perhaps in familiar contexts too). I am making it my goal is well, having to this point only imperfectly followed my own advice.

Burnout, a danger for introverts forced to the point of social exhaustion for too long, can be mitigated as a risk by effective communication with the rest of your team and balancing your social obligations if possible. One can also seek to improve one's social endurance, training to increase it like any other form of endurance.


NEXT ENTRY (Coming Soon): INTPs and Music