An INTP on the Mission Field - Wormtongue or Elrond?

Returning to the INTP series...

Back when I set out on my journey to the mission field, I noticed that there were not many people of my personality among my fellow travelers. To be sure, not all were extroverts, and my seminary was known for attracting former engineers. To be an INTP is not merely to be an introvert, however, but to be very interested in certain things few other people find compelling, and find real challenges in certain tasks most people find routine. That's true of every personality in one area or another, but for INTPs that tends to play out in ways that don't mesh naturally with the missionary lifestyle. It doesn't mean incessant navel-gazing or a robotic inability to empathize with others, but it does mean social energy is a resource that must be conserved wisely, and some time away to ponder the theory of everything (preferably in a high-altitude spot with a good view but also shade) is necessary every so often.

While I have written in the past about the specific struggles of being an INTP or my own experiences of working on the mission field as an INTP, today I want to challenge INTPs in a certain way which certainly doesn't only apply to INTPs. (Even you Enneagram people will get something out of it) To do that, we're going to first look at two well-known characters from the Lord of the Rings:

Grima Wormtongue: The Deceitful Hoarder

In the Rohan plotline of the Lord of the Rings hexalogy, we meet the subversive character of Grima Wormtongue. He is a servant of Saruman who is sabotaging Rohan from within while Saruman's forces ravage it from without. Grima is portrayed in a compelling way by Brad Dourrif in the Peter Jackson trilogy, although he's more Tim-Burtonesque than what I saw in my mind's eye reading the books. He wouldn't be a very effective tool of evil if his appearance and wardrobe screamed "tool of evil", and to some extent we've all been falsely trained by Hollywood to think evil looks like that in real life. Here the words of Lewis in his preface to Screwtape ring true:

The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices.

Whatever his appearance, Grima is a subtle and dangerous opponent, as Gandalf observes. After Gandalf arrives at Edoras and breaks Saruman's spell over Theoden, Grima is (somewhat surprisingly, in the context of the story at that point) spared and given a horse to leave. Even at that point, the soldiers of Rohan seem to view him more with contempt than fear, not comprehending how much damage he has done. Theoden does not order him executed but gives him the option to show loyalty or be exiled. In the end he spits on that offer and runs off to join Saruman.

Grima Wormtongue's story has many interesting parallels to Smeagol/Gollum:
- Both are characters who serve the cause of evil individually for their own reasons, and both are bound to their masters by means other than force (Gollum due to his enslavement to the ring Frodo bears, Grima due to fear and guilt).
- Both also "lose" precious magical artifacts: Gollum literally loses his precious, Sauron's ring of power, and Grima loses a palantir (magical seeing-stone) for Saruman by hurling it out of Orthanc at the protagonists assembled below. 

- Both were originally good or at least neutral, and in choosing evil consistently became twisted into something unlike their original selves. (Gandalf says to Theoden about Grima: "once it was a man, and did you service in its fashion.") 

- In the end, both characters are spared when they could have been executed, and eventually attack their master for more or less the very reason they've been serving them. (Gollum when ring-lust overcomes him, and Grima when his fearful hatred finally tips to the side of hatred). 

- In another odd connection, Grima is actually killed by roused-up Hobbits who are taking the Shire back after he snaps and kills Saruman with a knife. (In the movie version which dispenses with this part of the story and moves Saruman's death to a much earlier scene, Grima is shot by Legolas)

Also similar to Smeagol/Gollum, Grima is a thief (who likes to accuse others to hide his own guilt): His crimes are not only limited to spying for Saruman and functioning as a sort of proxy by which Saruman's corroding influence on Theoden can be locally amplified (whether very obviously in the films, or more subtly in the books); he is actively working for the downfall of Rohan in whatever ways he can, and this extends to pilfering and thieving as well.

Grima apparently acted partly out of greed; Saruman had promised him spoils after what he assumed was his inevitable victory, which possibly included Eowyn as well (I may not be alone in thinking in that case victory would have ended Grima faster than defeat did). Apparently he had begun this spoil-taking preemptively: When Grima is forced to retrieve Theoden's sword, it is remarked that "many things men have missed" are found in the trunk where he had stashed the sword away. This is purposefully not elaborated upon by Tolkien, but one assumes that the various other things are items of real or symbolic strength which have been stolen away by Grima. Ahead of Saruman's assumed victory, he couldn't keep his hands off of the most valuable things he could find when the opportunity to steal them away and hoard them presented itself. 

Elrond of Imladris: The Wise Giver

Let us now consider an extremely different character in LotR: Elrond the Half-elven, Lord of Rivendell (called Imladris by the elves)

It wouldn't be helpful here to spend lots of time on Elrond's backstory, so let's summarize by saying Elrond and his brother Elros were born back in the Elder days, the children of a rare and specific High Elf/Historically Important Human marriage. They were given the option to choose their fate, whether to be Elven or Human (in Tolkien's world the afterlife works differently for the two groups, so being "mixed" wasn't an option), and Elrond chose to be of the elven kind, later becoming Lord of Rivendell, important to the plot of both the Hobbit and LotR, and holding one of the three Elven great rings. (His brother chose to be human and founded Numinor, of which Aragorn is the last descendant of the line of kings.) 

Rivendell/Imladris is an interesting place; in the Hobbit it is treated a bit more lightly, with elves singing in trees and Elrond the sage leader of a "homely house" at the edge of wilderland, who primarily helps the Dwarves figure out a map. In the Lord of the Rings and connected works it is described further as one of the three major strongholds of the Elves in Middle Earth, alongside the Shipyards which protect the elves access to the journey west across the Sundering Seas to the Undying Lands, and Galadriel's woodland stronghold of Lothlorien. Rivendell is important enough that it is mentioned in Tolkien's additional writings that Sauron had been hoping to mobilize Smaug and the goblin armies of the north against it, had Smaug not been taken out by Bard in the events of The Hobbit and Dale subsequently re-established as a stronghold that eventually limited Sauron's northern campaign.

Rivendell is described by Bilbo, who ends up living there long term after his departure from the Shire, as "a perfect house, whether you like food or sleep or story-telling or singing, or just sitting and thinking best, or a pleasant mixture of them all." It is the only place Aragorn could call home, the place where the shards of Narsil were preserved as revealed in dreams to Boromir and Faramir, along with many other things not to be found anywhere else in Middle Earth.

As the Lord of Rivendell, Elrond is wise and conservative (somewhat unlike the Jackson films' take on his character), but willing to generously provide precious gifts and important advice from the accumulated bounty of his house as appropriate.

Matthew 13:52

Having looked at those two characters, let's take a look at the truth of scripture. Specifically Matthew 13:52, which reads as follows: 

"And [Jesus] said to them, "Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a master of a house, who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old."

Jesus says this in the literary context of a string of parables, including some of the most famous and quickly recognized parables in the gospels (the sower and the seed, the wheat and tares, the mustard seed, etc.). After the disciples ask about the meaning of the wheat and the tares parable, they claim to understand the next three parables Jesus tells (treasure in the field, pearl of great price, fish in the net). At that point Jesus gives the statement above.

He uses an unusual expression here: "The scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven." In Jesus' day, the profession of scribe doubtless had attracted some INTPs; the job was to record and accumulate information. (Though the legal and administrative responsibilities that came with the task might have scared them off again) In the gospels we typically see the scribes at odds with Jesus, but here he speaks of scribes who are trained for the Kingdom.

There is much wisdom densely packed into this statement. The scribe needs to be trained in order to be like the master with treasures to offer. The training needs to be kingdom training, not merely scribal training. Yet a scribe is already trained to handle religious law carefully and correctly. When someone trained to handle important information carefully is then trained for the kingdom, truly he will have old things and new things to offer, from the redeemed "palace of his mind" of which he will be the master if he learns to take every thought captive for Christ.  

Two Paths for an INTP:

The Matthew verse has always reminded me of Elrond, Master of the House of Rivendell, with great treasures from which he brings forth new(er) and old gifts to aid the cause of Good. And his gifts are not always material, but also good counsel and wisdom, like the scribe above can offer. The opposite of Grima, he does not steal from others to hoard away, but accumulates good things to provide help and succor to others. He does not infiltrate and manipulate, he establishes and maintains.

Elrond himself doesn't take the front lines (not by the timeline of Lord of the Rings, except as part of the White Council). His main role is to be master of Rivendell and to maintain that strong place, described in the Silmarillion as a "refuge for the weary and the oppressed, and a treasury of good counsel and wise lore."

Similarly, an INTP is usually not going to be charging into the front lines full of battle fury, and that's not necessarily where you want an INTP. An INTP is not likely to show up with an army behind him either; the gifts of charisma and natural magnetism and strong-willed leadership that's not afraid to break a few eggs to make an omelet or chew out a subordinate when they need it are not the forte of an INTP. (Though it's quite likely this hypothetical leader's strategic war council has an INTP or three)

On the mission field, however, those who charge in furiously are likely to burn out just as furiously, sometimes leaving a mess that longer-term workers must labor to clean up. And those leaders who can inspire natural loyalty and dominate their subordinates may fail at the servant leadership and humility which seeks not to create a personal empire but to serve and build up the local church, to watch less qualified and gifted leaders struggle and encourage them rather than taking charge. 

By contrast, an INTP will be seeking to impose structure on disorder, to accumulate knowledge and wisdom, to determine what is most valuable and focus their limited energy on obtaining that. Above all, to understand, in a cohesive and articulate sense, what is real and true, to further grasp reality through this, and then to pass on this knowledge to others in useful ways. 

So in terms of leadership, an INTP rarely leads by jumping to the front and rallying others to their standard (I'd love to hear real-life examples of what happened in those situations), but they will seek positions of influence and adequate resources to have at their disposal instead, so that their knowledge and understanding and strategic thinking can be seen as strengths.

Having arrived in this kind of situation, the INTP has two paths to take; we'll call them the Wormtongue path and the Rivendell path:

On the Wormtongue path, the INTP is a loner who seeks influence and resources selfishly or anxiously. Protection and influence can be found by joining a strong leader, and resources can be obtained by wit and stratagem at the expense of others if necessary. Grima seemingly had no allies or "team" in Rohan; as an individual he had already attached himself to a strong leader (Theoden) then betrayed him in favor of a more powerful one with more resources (Saruman). It was an intelligent and strategic choice in terms of personal benefit, but it was an alliance with evil. Underestimated by the strength-and-honor warrior culture around him, Grima had an eye for what was most valuable and had already begun to accumulate it for his own purposes. Doubtless he felt pride in strategically steering Rohan to its ruin, in being the unseen puppeteer, a temptation which many INTPs may especially feel, to use their intelligence and strategic thinking skills to manipulate events for their own security and a desirable outcome. In the end, however, forces beyond his control brought all his careful schemes to ruin.

On the Rivendell path, by contrast, the INTP seeks influence and resources as part of a coalition which seeks to bless and build up: not subversive but superversive. Rivendell didn't build itself, and Elrond did not move to Gondor and slowly take over, like Sauron in Numinor, though he could probably have done so in a similar fashion. Elrond did start with resources few others had, but he used those to build up a strong house (both a location, but also a company of people) which was a blessing to any who stayed there or who passed through. Simply by dedicating himself to being the master of that house as a sort of locus for what was good and true, maintaining "the old that was strong and did not wither," yet recognizing a new age was at hand, Elrond was a major influence for the powers of Good in Middle Earth. 

Seek for the Sword that was broken: In Imladris it dwells;
There shall be counsels taken, stronger than Morgul-spells.
There shall be shown a token, that Doom is near at hand;
for Isildur's Bane shall waken, and the Halfling forth shall stand.

The Last Homely House East of the Sea

And Rivendell was not merely a stronghold and refuge, it also stood for something greater than itself. It was not only called a "Homely House," but "The Last Homely House East of the Sea." This meant it was not only a place of refuge, a place of peace and light and truth, but it pointed to the origin of those things, and the place to which they would return: The True West, in Tolkien's mythos, the Undying Lands, where the servants of God lived, and where the elves desired to return. White shores, and a far green country, under a swift sunrise. The world as it ought to be. Aslan's country, beyond the farthest waves that grow sweet. What people got in Rivendell, then, was not merely rest and refuge, and perhaps wise advice, possibly precious gifts, but also a glimmer of that eternal light beyond the Sundering Seas. What they felt there was a taste of heaven on earth.

The world needs Homely Houses. It will need them more in the coming days. Whether an actual home or establishment, a group of like-minded people, or even few close friends who have accumulated resources and wisdom with the desire to bless and give refuge to others, these small strongholds of light will stand against the turmoil of the world as they have done since the beginning. These places of peace where a little taste of heaven on earth can be experienced stand like burning beacons in the dark for peoples who have chosen to forget the legacy of the gospel they once received, or who have never known it. 

I wish that every church could be a Homely House, which points to and communicates the reality of an Undying World beyond the Sundering Seas not only via the truth kept there, and hopefully shared faithfully there, but as fellowships of light and wisdom and richness and refuge and peace which give those who visit a taste of God’s country. Sadly, many are not like that at all. Sadly, some have this appearance (like one ancient and famous example whose strong stone vault endured a devastating fire last week and protected what was within) but the truth itself may be but little heard inside. But by God’s grace the two are not mutually exclusive, and need not remain so.

And while INTPs have their unique struggles, if they are trained for the kingdom, building up a house (a space, and a fellowship) from which may be brought out treasures old and new for the blessing of the saints and advancement of the kingdom is a task for which they are indeed well-equipped. If God has not yet presented a more specific path to you, I believe it's worth pursuing. Be trained in the kingdom, and build up a house. The path must be chosen daily, and the road will be long, but He goes with us, and before us, and follows after.

INTP Thoughts: From Sherlock to Lecrae - Post-postmodernism

I have several posts on their way to being finished, but here's what's on my mind these days.

What Sherlock Holmes Missed

"The world is woven from billions of lives, every strand crossing every other. What we call premonition is just movement of the web. If you could attenuate to every strand of quivering data, the future would be entirely calculable... as inevitable as mathematics." - Sherlock Holmes (Sherlock, Season 4 Episode 1)

As an INTP, I am constantly analyzing how everything in the world fits together, in an increasingly complicated model, which means my default state is a deep curiosity about everything, especially areas where I have no experience or knowledge (wikipedia was dangerous for a while until I got used to its existence), since it's all helpful for building the model of how everything works and and is influenced by everything else. Despite not being a dominant intuitive type, for areas of the model where we have a lot of experience/data, INTPs can still sometimes make leaps of intuition like Sherlock Holmes (though obviously not as dramatically and not enough to base a legendary fictional career on) because we've understood something deeply enough that we can make educated guesses according to its nature with some degree of accuracy, what Sherlock was expanding to all of reality in his super-INTP-ness. (Must have access to... ALL the data)

What Sherlock missed, however, at least in the context of the quote above, was inevitable, given that his character in the (deservedly) popular series is written as a dismissive atheist. Without factoring God in, it really all becomes math, because there is no greater Mind and Will behind observable reality. People are ultimately predictable, in this worldview, because in the end everything does come down to clockwork... the big bang was when the unthinkably immense wound-up spring was released (For many physicists who are not believers, their definition of God is "Whoever or whatever wound up that spring the first time"), and everything is simply energy falling downhill from there, and all people who ever lived are merely a curious by-product of radiant energy from our star striking a body in space with the right collocation of elements enough times that it started an extremely complicated and impossibly unlikely (except that we can observe it happened) self-sustaining chemical reaction which somehow got more and more complicated as it went along, unlike the way anything else works in nature.

If all that were true, then yes, we could at some point design a vast quantum supercomputer which would be a (lowercase) god for all practical purposes, which could model enough of the universe to know the future and predict natural phenomenon and human behavior.

What those atheists (including people like Neal Stephenson, author of books like Cryptonomicon and Reamde which I enjoyed a great deal) and the character of Sherlock Holmes in the popular current series have in common, is an almost charming anachronism: they are loyal modernists in a time when we are already leaving postmodernism behind for what comes after.

Post-postmodernism: I identify as a genius

The Legacy of Modernism, and the end of Postmodernism

To oversimplify, Modernism rejected traditional values and authority in favor of a grand forward-looking narrative in which we could throw off convention and become whatever we want. It became increasingly turbulent, however, and as Postmodernist thinking emerged there was doubt and rejection toward various premises previously taken for granted. In postmodernist thinking there could be no uniting narrative, no objective truth, all was constructed by one's context ("you only think that because ____"). In the popular consciousness, it was the age of subjectivity, "truth is relative."

Now that postmodernism has peaked and gone into decline, we are entering the new age of Post-postmodernism (no better term has been agreed on yet, my favorite so far is "metamodernism"). As with previous shifts, we preserve some remnants of previous ages while rejecting the current unifying idea and seeking a new "center" to hold things together. It will be a very interesting time if we don't all kill each other in ideological civil wars first.

In a nutshell: At the change of each thought-age in the West, people have rejected something that kept society at peace (common tradition under an aristocracy, common trajectory under a bureaucracy, common tolerance under a plutocracy) as the sins of each ruling group become too obvious and unjust to ignore. As the times shift, whatever was "the center" that held everyone together begins to give way at the same time as the group in power loses legitimacy, and there is a massive societal shift. Modernism: Reject Unifying Tradition - Find your own path
(What keeps us from fighting - a story that unites us)

Post-modernism: Reject Unifying Narrative - Find your own viewpoint
(What keeps us from fighting - living and letting live)

Post-post modernism: Reject Unifying Tolerance - Find your own identity
(What keeps us from fighting - good fences make good neighbors? the jury is still out)

What Comes Next: Messiness

The advent of post-postmodernism can be seen with the focus on identity recently. First we lost the unifying traditions, then we lost the unifying story, now we're losing any unifying identity labels too. When Lecrae decides that he's been trying to put aside his blackness to be Evangelical and says he doesn't want to do that anymore, he's responding to the shift where a deeper part of his identity he calls his roots (the racial/subcultural identity) calls more compellingly than a shallower one (Evangelicalism emerged in response to certain factors, like Fundamentalism before it, and the Church will remain long after both are merely part of Church history). Leaving evangelicalism because associations or aspects of it start to conflict with another part of one's identity doesn't mean leaving the Church, but it demonstrates when cognitive dissonance gets too strong, we "pull back" to less ambiguous identities.

Ironically the same phenomenon is at work with Southerners resisting attempts to purge Confederate flags and statues from the public eye. "Southerness" for many is an identity deeper than an Evangelicalism that says to keep things comfortable, Lecrae shouldn't be "too Black" and Southerners shouldn't be "too Southern." But the world is tired of playing nicely with others a little too different from us for comfort, and "the center is failing to hold," as in Yeats' famous poem. "We do" is no longer a quick answer to the question "who benefits?" because the "we" is getting really iffy.

In the Church, selfless love is supposed to be the glue that holds us together. When by the Spirit's help we manage it, it does work beautifully. In the world outside however, once tradition was found oppressive, and the narrative deconstructed, a broad-minded tolerance was preached as the new glue that would keep us all together. It has failed.

So How Do We Engage an Age of Post-Postmodernism?

For Christians, every change of thought-age is both troublesome and helpful. Modernism was sure there could be no supernatural, but people went to church because that's what good people did; post-modernism wasn't so sure, but it fractured the basic concept of absolute truth and people began to lose the church habit. Post-postmodernism is thirsty for the divine again, and searching for truth, but it wants to fracture us into identity groups at the same time, and a generation is growing up largely unchurched but ready to embrace causes and identities that don't compromise.

So on the one hand, our marching orders have never changed: Speak the truth in love, make disciples of all nations. Actually do that, don't talk about doing it or hold conferences about doing it. On the other hand, understanding and enduring the next decades will require a lot more wisdom and boldness than the Church has shown in recent decades. Do a little reading on the times; a storm is coming. Some have predicted the nation itself will get fragmented into groups that align based on those deep identity fault lines that have slumbered under a wealthy and tolerant age but never went away. That may never happen, but it's clear we are not entering an age of stability, but of things being pulled apart in seismic shifts. When the center can't hold, to continue with Yeats' poem, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. The Church, built on a rock against which the gates of hell may not prevail, has been acting like an eager-to-please kite, blown here and there by popular secular trends. ("We can do feminism too." "We can care about climate change too." "Please acknowledge our relevance in the areas you've developed." "Notice me, Senpai." -- Meanwhile there's a steady trickle of evangelicals to Catholic and Orthodox churches) Now weak-conscienced church leaders are debilitated by every accusation of collective guilt the world throws at them. Commanded to love proactively, we are passively nice. Directionless except for inertia, we have expressed our dismay at the state of society either silently in the voting booth or loudly on social media, but not often made disciples of our neighbors. Even when we've strayed perhaps too far into politics, we've mostly chosen the label "Conservative." (What, exactly, are we trying to conserve at this point? It's a lose-lose proposition, wading into the political arena primarily concerned that we come across as respectable folk who know how to retreat with their honor intact. But I digress.)

The choice to be passive, tolerant, and easily swayed, damaging to the church in the best of times, will not even be a choice in the days to come. Belief is coming back into fashion to an almost alarming degree, and institutions with weak and yielding faith will simply not endure. Houses built on the sand will not survive the storm, but the Church as a whole is antifragile. She has survived every tumult of history, for Christ sustains her. The Kingdom will advance, but it may advance without you.

So: Be strong in the Lord, and in the strength of His might. Put on the whole armor of God, not just the belt and shoes that can be coordinated with your Sunday outfit. In the post-postmodern age, believe unapologetically and they will come, and see whether we truly do have life abundantly and the words of eternal life. If we truly believe Christ is the only hope for a sin-struck world sinking into chaos and clinging to dreams of the latest reincarnation of Babel, now is the time to start acting like it.

An INTP on the Mission Field: Stuck in a Rut - Which Wheel needs a Branch?

Thanks for your Comments:

I have been encouraged by the positive comments some people have been leaving on earlier posts. It turns out there isn't much online for Christian INTPs. But yes, we do exist, and no, being creatures of logic doesn't mean we can't be believers in a God the worship of whom, given His existence, is not only logical, but the only sane course of action. Everything rides on the question of whether you first assume God, or first assume No-God; logic will take you in two different directions from that point, but to stick with the second assumption you must close your eyes to wider reality (general revelation), dismiss the faith of all believers throughout history along with the testimony of Christian scripture (special revelation), and reject any instances of God doing unusual things in your life to suggest His existence. Following up on any one of those would bring one to the point where logic suggested atheism was untenable, and one would either need to flee to the refuge of agnosticism or follow the journey of evidence and faith to its conclusion, as many atheists in history have in fact done. (C.S.Lewis being an obvious high profile example, but there are others)

Also, though some cast aspersion on the Myers-Briggs test for being "unscientific," etc, it has turned out to be a very helpful thing in the internet age, in that all of us people who are a certain way now have a name for ourselves and can find each other. Yes we all have our individual differences, but when someone is describing themselves in the context of being an INTP and you say to yourself, "Yes, exactly, so I'm not the only one!" then you know you have something of value in a categorization that allows that to happen. And I suspect it is not only INTPs who have that kind of experience.

1. Spinning our Wheels

Being both intuitive and logical types, INTPs are very capable of taking information from a wide variety of sources and suddenly arriving at valuable insights or conclusions on topics that may not be obviously related to the source material.

So, when confronted with a challenge in life, we tend to try to pull from our collection of data and observations and intuit a solution to it. Finding a creative solution which makes an apparently difficult problem simple is very fun, if nothing else, and feeling that every situation is both similar to others and unique in its own way, I tend to not want to apply a "standard" solution but either customize it to fit the particular context, or come up with an entirely new approach altogether. (This is somewhat useful on the mission field, since a lot of problems one encounters really are unique, or previous solutions are unusable because what worked in the past for a particular set of people in a particular context isn't a viable solution for here and now)

There are two weaknesses that arise from our intuitive problem-solving tendencies, however.

A. Being satisfied with a theoretical solution

The first is well known, and not limited only to INTPs; the idea that once a solution has been arrived at, the actual doing of it is left as an exercise for the interested student. You may have heard the joke about the three academics (usually a physicist, an engineer, and a mathematician) who, caught in a fire, all figure out how to escape, but one dies because having solved the problem of how to put out the fire he considers himself successful. Yet the fire still rages, despite a perfectly good solution now existing.

INTPs can fall into the same trap: I have on multiple occasions felt out of shape, and began googling exercise plans, seeking to get behind this or that plan and understand an "essential" workout might be in terms of an average human body, and thus arrive at the most efficient workout in terms of not needing to spend a lot of time on it but seeing adequate results (living in our heads, perhaps some of us begrudge our body the proper maintenance time it requires). But having done so, less than half of the time did I actually make an effort to put that basic, efficient exercise plan into action. The fact that I'd located and grasped the core physiological principles required for a brief and efficient workout seemed like winning half the battle, when it was really only a preparation for a battle I never ended up fighting.

The knowing of a thing is not the doing of it, and the essence of a workout is not understanding the essence of a workout, it's doing the workout, imperfectly and when you don't feel like it, over and over. (Something I'm terrible at, because I want to to do everything "in the flow" and workouts rarely start with that feeling and only sometimes end up achieving it)

Either way, whether the problem is academic, or concerns our work, our life, our interpersonal relationships, or all of the above, the result is that we remain where we are, and don't move forward.

B. Getting trapped in a vicious cycle

The other problem, and a nastier one, is when we are unable to quickly intuit a creative solution to a problem, and began to fixate on it. We assume there is some missing piece of information which, if put into the mix, would recalibrate everything and a solution would magically emerge as it so often does. And when that happens it's a beautiful feeling, but often it simply doesn't. (It especially doesn't when it's an interpersonal problem.)

Like a car with tires in the mud, in that situation throwing more mental resources at the problem, focusing more intensely on it, often only makes things worse. The problem begins to loom large in our psyche, and though some INTPs might do their best thinking under stress, I suspect for many of us this is not the case. For those of us prone to getting mentally flustered, the effort thrown at figuring out a problem might become more or less totally unproductive, just churning processor cycles, spinning our wheels fruitlessly.

We might try to thrust the problem aside, to think about other things, but it's there, like a dead mouse under a hard-to-move bookshelf, sending a vague odor that makes us feel guilty for not solving the issue but not guilty enough to start taking all the books out of the shelves just to get at the rodent corpse. And like a bad odor, the-problem-we-can't-figure-out will taint our mental life if we let it run unabated.

As before, we can pretend to ignore the problem while subconsciously continuing to be stressed about it, or we can obsess over it, but either way we are stuck.

2. Actually Pragmatic Lateral Thinking

Perhaps I am simply a wimpy example of an INTP, but sometimes in these situations I find myself wishing or hoping I might simply find a way around the problem. Being clever and creative, I am quite good at this, but in the end the one I'm outsmarting is myself. The problems that bring us INTPs up short and without solutions are precisely those kinds of problems that we have to figure out how to solve to continue achieving personal growth. And if our eternal side project is not personal growth but, somewhat relentlessly, the pursuit of the theory of everything and how its all related to itself, we will find that personal growth actually serves this objective as well. (We can perceive more standing on higher ground)

Wanting to get in better shape, I once agreed to a friendly bench-pressing competition with some coworkers, back when I was a programmer. I started out pretty weak, and never got to impressive weights, but was pleased after a while to be benching 110% of my bodyweight. At that point I hit a frustrating plateau, where more effort on the bench seemed not to translate into more results. After talking to more experienced lifters, I began to realize that, as someone who hadn't been doing this long, nor being particularly robust, I needed to strengthen my whole body before my bench started improving again. I'd maxed out my short-term capabilities, and needed to grow stronger overall before more effort in a particular exercise was going to be effective.

Very often, for INTPs (or anyone), we need to stop pushing forward obsessively and do some lateral thinking. Lateral thinking should be a strongpoint of INTPs, so it's a bit ironic that we rarely follow that logic when it comes to our own lives.

For a more specific example, in studying Chinese I was finding myself hitting a plateau, or even losing confidence with the level of Chinese I had already attained. I tried berating myself, tried concentrating harder, nothing helped significantly. But then I started taking vitamins due to other health issues, and suddenly the problem resolved itself, and I felt like I'd suddenly remembered to release the emergency brake. My mental cloudiness was seemingly the result of a nutrient deficiency. Thinking harder didn't help at all, but a little vitamin pill after lunch with some magnesium helped considerably.


[N.B. If you have the gift of a higher abstract level of self-awareness, as I suspect INTPs typically do, then you are already ahead of the game because you are capable of a high level of metamotivation; the ability to regulate and coordinate your behavior in support of long-term goals. There is no inherent conflict between this tendency and your walk with God, it simply means you have to submit yourself to God very intentionally to ensure you are not undermining your walk with God with self-serving goals. (Maslow was a smart man, but his theory is inherently flawed since he rejects the idea of a sin nature) High levels of self-actualization are something like a human version of sanctification, and thus while it is a good thing, it should never be confused with what only the Spirit can work in us, nor given de facto priority since it's something we can control. I'm seeing a lot of confusion of the two lately from the squishier side of evangelicalism, and it's as dangerous to those who are attracted to ideas like the power of positive thinking as it is annoying to those of us who find solace in Ecclesiastes.]

3. Don't just lower a Window; Get out, Look at the Car, and Figure out which Wheel needs a Branch thrown under it for Traction

So, INTP or not, if you find yourself in a wheels-spinning-in-the-mud situation, don't just keep mashing the accelerator. Even if you are blessed with a mental V10, no traction means you're not going anywhere. In the worst case, you'll just run out of gas or set your tires on fire. Now, it's pretty common to suggest "you just need to shift your focus," but I'm not just talking about taking a walk or doing something random to distract yourself. I don't know about you, but I can't fool myself with that kind of thing, I'll just obsess over my problems on my walk too, etc. Or if I successfully distract myself during the nice walk, the problems wait patiently until the evening grows late, to arrive just in time to induce insomnia.

Instead, think laterally with regards to your own life, and be prepared to make changes. If you find yourself unable to rise to a particular challenge, your problem may not be a lack of mental effort or ability. Take a look at your current condition of life instead. One or more of your wheels aren't getting traction, which means your mind is stuck in a rut too, until everything gets moving again.

Emotional and mental and physical health are all tied together, and spiritual health affects all of these as well. Whether you are a dichotomist (body, soul) or trichotomist (body, soul, spirit) or octochotomist (who knows), humans were created with a body and meant to have one. Our existence after death as spirits awaiting final judgement and the new beginning of all things (whether in glory or in shame, with God or having rejected Him and existing in isolation from Him, which truly is hell), is actually an artificial and temporary state of affairs. In the new earth we will have bodies, just as Christ did. So while quotes like "You don't have a soul, you are a soul; you have a body." which C.S.Lewis never said, are popular, in one sense they are not biblical, or at least they are too short-sighted. You will only temporarily not have a body; the eternal plan is that you will have a glorious one.

We are designed to function as a unified whole. So for INTPs, who tend to ponder and throw their mental circuitry at every problem, when we get stuck in a rut, or up against problems we can't think our way out of, the problem might not lie in a failure of thinking at all. Look for weaknesses in other wheels. Where is the slippage occurring? Get some traction there, and you may find everything else begins to move forward.

"My Power is made Perfect in Weakness": Christian Antifragility

Dear Readers: I hope you all had a joyful Christmas. (I recognize it has not exactly been a peaceful holiday for many of you, with the crazy weather across the United States).

The New Year now approaches, promising to be even more complicated and chaotic than last year as tense and unstable situations around the world are further destabilized. Plus elections. It is well for followers of Jesus that our hope is not in this world, else it would be a bad time for hope.

(And to top it all off, next year will begin the Chinese Year of the Red Fire Monkey. As a believer I place zero faith in astrology of any kind, but I had a laugh at how humorously ominous that sounds...)

Doesn't start until February, actually

As an INTP, ideas are my currency, and the ever-present task in the back of my mind is to keep figuring out how our world works in all its complexity. A few years ago I was exposed to the idea of "antifragility," explained below, and found it to be a very important new property to look for in any human endeavor (including those of the Church). As we seem to be entering a time in which circumstances grow eerily similar to those that preceded the World Wars of the previous century, we can take heart knowing that the Church which has endured every hardship and trial of history will emerge from whatever societal chaos may come, because she is built on a foundation which cannot be shaken by the world.

The Idea: Antifragility

The concept as currently articulated is the brainchild of Nassim Taleb, a Lebanese-American thinker/author/risk analyst, who has written important work on the impact of "flukes" or "random catastrophes" called Black Swans, with the implication that it's foolish to regard them as unavoidable events, but that they should be expected to come eventually, and can even be profited from accordingly.

This initial work was followed by more research and contemplation of the subject, which he developed further conceptually and for which he eventually coined the term antifragility. The idea is usually explained in a threefold manner:

1. Fragility: We know what fragile means: that something which is fragile must be handled with care, that it cannot receive shocks or stress without sustaining damage or even being destroyed. Fine glassware is fragile, as an obvious example.

2. Resilience: Normally one would say that the opposite of fragility is resilience, or toughness: the ability to handle shocks and stress and not take much damage, or at least to recover quickly. A rubber sole is resilient, a piece of oak is resilient, etc.

3. Antifragility: Taleb's innovative idea is that resilience is not really the opposite of fragility. The true opposite of fragility would not be something which is more able to endure shocks or stress, but which would grow stronger due to them. With no good word to describe this property, Taleb made up a word: Antifragility. If you remember basic Greek mythology, there was a beast called a Hydra, which for every head cut off would grow multiple heads in its place. "Stress," in this case physical damage, was actually helpful to it. Another example would be the bones of a child: if they break, a properly healed bone is actually stronger at the previous breaking point than it was before the fracture.

The three-fold analogy of fragility, resilience, and antifragility is explained in a good summary article on the Art of Manliness. If this blog post interests you in the subject, that's a great place to start.

For now, suffice to say that while resiliency becomes very desirable when facing a time of rapid changes and above average stress, antifragility is the secret to those groups which don't merely weather the storms, but somehow seem to profit from them and come out stronger.

We see examples of this in the news today:

Muslim terror groups are often quite antifragile. The more Western military might tries to pulverize them, the more they melt away into the populace, recruiting more people to their cause due to collateral damage. Soon new cells pop up where none were before. It's the hydra all over again.

The stock market, on the other hand, is fragile. 2008 demonstrated what can happen when an entire economic system becomes fragile and is hit by a shock, in that case the housing lending bubble popping. The US economy is also fragile with regards to oil; any significant jump in the oil price and the whole taut system quivers anxiously.

This explains why somehow the mighty Western powers have found themselves unable to defeat a radical Islamic foe that is positively dwarfed in terms of military power and not really liked by anyone: The West is fragile with regards to dependence on oil, and antifragile radical groups are destabilizing the region where the oil is. We can't ignore them, then, for pragmatic if not moral reasons, but our previous strategies only seem to have made matters worse. Part of the reason we haven't defeated them is not because they are tougher than us, but because they are antifragile. While individual terrorists and radical muslim cells can be killed quickly, on the whole this strengthens their movement.

Fragility and Antifragility cannot be confused with weakness and strength either. Before the War in Iraq, Saddam's dictatorship was much stronger than the subversive elements in his territory, but it was also more fragile than they; once our both stronger and more resilient military wiped Saddam's forces off the map, the regime went down easily. The antifragile radical movements which took advantage of the chaos are not so easily dealt with, however, and will require different strategies.

Antifragility is often found in conjunction with small size, redundancy, decentralization, a willingness to take small risks if the chance of reward is good, and a focus on increasing one's available options.

With all this in mind, antifragility sounds like a great thing to pursue in one's personal life. But can it be related at all to our faith? Should a Christian even try to use this kind of "success" strategy? Let's take a look.

A Case for Christian Antifragility

1. Is it ungodly to strive for something like antifragility?

When talking about making our ministries or churches more robust, the first instinct is that this is of course a good thing. Then, sometimes, a "spiritual" objection arises: shouldn't we be focusing not on our own strength, but on dependency on God? "When we are weak, He is strong," after all.

My answer to this is that "when we are weak, He is strong" is not a command but an observation. Paul makes it in Second Corinthians after "boasting" of his qualifications and his suffering for God in 2 Cor 11 and 12. He then mentions his "thorn in the flesh," an enigmatic term which commentators have enjoyed guessing about for centuries, as a reminder from God that His grace is sufficient, for His power is made perfect in weakness. Paul says, with much grounds for boasting of his "street cred" as a gospel worker, that "to keep me from becoming conceited" (ESV; NET has "so that I would not become arrogant) he was given this thorn in the flesh to remind him of his own weakness. His boasting of his own weakness is therefore both a willing submission to God's reminder and a joyful proclamation of the strength of Christ, of whom Paul lives to preach.

And that is generally my response to this kind of objection. We don't need to strive to be weak, because like Paul, whatever we think we may have to boast about, we are already weak. God's power is made perfect in us when we recognize that weakness, when the illusion of our own tiny ability is seen for what it is, and we humbly rely on strength from God. A crumb on the lens of a telescope can obscure stars larger than our sun. It doesn't mean the crumb might not be big compared to other crumbs, but our perspective tempts us to compare it to the star, which is more ridiculous than we can comprehend.

2. Honoring God in our Ministries

All that is to say, any kind of argument that trying to make our churches and ministries stronger is inherently an attempt to take glory from God and give it to men, or to exalt ourselves and our strength against God's, is simply wrong. Those things might happen if we go about it the wrong way, or with the wrong motives, but it's not wrong to do the best job we can, in fact it's sinful not to attempt to. We are not to strive for weak ministries, but good and effective ones. Our weakness is something to bring before God as an obvious condition, not a property with which we ought to seek to imbue our efforts.

So if we are loving God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, we will not be ambivalent about setting up our ministries to function as well as we can, from the human standpoint, while praying always for the work of the Holy Spirit to accomplish the work in people's hearts that we cannot.

3. The Church is already Antifragile

And if we believe we have a responsibility to strengthen our churches and ministries, then, we should take note that God has already established the Church as an Antifragile institution.

In the early days of the faith, once Christianity was no longer viewed as an odd flavor of Judaism but a new, non-sanctioned faith that was rapidly spreading among the Roman populace, Roman emperors undertook campaigns to discourage or eliminate the growing Church.

From a human standpoint, the "stress" on the Church was very great; multitudes lost their property and were imprisoned, and many lost their lives as well.

(Note: I have not linked to the Wikipedia article on Roman Persecutions, as it seems mainly concerned that we understand the Christians were making an overly big deal about it and the Romans were just trying to keep order.. In general I suggest being cautious of Wikipedia these days; many of the editors who oversee page content are self-proclaimed activists who push the pages in the direction of their own views)

However, we have a saying, "the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church." (Tertullian)
The result of all those persecutions is that the Church grew very rapidly, both as the plight of believers drew attention and sympathy to their faith, and as they were often driven from one area to another, spreading the gospel to new areas it would have reached more slowly otherwise.

A similar thing happened in China during the closed years of the Cultural Revolution; when Christians came in from outside later, fearing the Church had been reduced or eliminated entirely, they found it had instead grown greatly during the difficult years.

To say, then, that the Church is antifragile, is not to deny that it was God's power that expanded and protected Her; antifragility is not a cause but a property, and the Church by its nature possesses this property, due to exactly what we discussed above: God's power is made perfect in weakness. This means the more desperate of circumstances we are reduced to, as a church, as the Church, or as individuals, the more we may see God do.

Therefore we see that "God's power is made perfect in weakness" is actually a bold revelation of startling truth. We thought the equation was:

"Do your best, and God will do the rest": 

But what Paul reveals is that in reality we have this:

"My power is made perfect in weakness": 

As you may remember from math class, as the denominator goes to zero, the value of the fraction goes to infinity. As our strength fails, there is no limit to what God can do.
This is not merely antifragility, but ultimate, supernatural antifragility.

Satan is very strong, but he is merely resilient. By the gift of "weakness," together with His power, God has made the Church so that the gates of hell truly may never prevail against it, by its very nature. This is why prosperity and ease are the most effective tools in the arsenal against the Church. Suffering and hardship actually make the Church stronger; of social influence, political power, and comfortable circumstances weaken it by hampering and slowing its development.

Antifragility for the Believer, Ministry, or Church

A. Church

So if the Church (the Body of Christ as a whole) is already antifragile, how about a church? How about your own local church?

Sadly, though the Church only grows stronger through persecution, individual churches may split over any number of issues, mostly strong personalities coming into conflict. This kind of "church multiplication" is not antifragile, it merely takes something fragile and breaks it into two fragile pieces.

A strong and healthy church, however, which reproduces itself, could be antifragile. A church of healthy and developing small groups of whatever form is already very resilient, and is probably antifragile. Any harm befalling the church, be it financial, loss of important people, etc., can not only be made up for by everyone coming together, but it is an opportunity for training and discipleship to be put into action. Someone may need to step into the old role.

A church seeking to be antifragile will have redundancy as well; a church with a human bottleneck (one or more indispensable people) is quite common, and may be quite efficient, but it's very fragile. Should that one or those key personnel be removed, the church might be in serious trouble. Rather than praying for God not to ever let that person be unable to perform in that role, then if they are unable to, putting it down to God's mysterious will that the church suffer all these problems (this is what the Muslims do with "Inshallah"... it's not at all a proper application of the doctrine of God's sovereignty), a church seeking to become less fragile will have that person train others to do what they do.
(That feeling of being indispensable is both pleasant and addicting for very many people, but it's not helpful to the survival of the church. It must be laid at the cross along with everything else)

So, two tips for an antifragile church:
1. Healthy, "real" small groups, with the goal of each being capable of functioning as a microchurch if necessary
2. Anyone with an important role in the church has trained at least one person to do what they do (it doesn't have to be perfect, or even well, they just need to be able to do it) Note that this includes the senior pastor. Most churches' weakest point is the senior pastor, because he's irreplaceable. Some churches never recover from the loss of an especially beloved or capable senior pastor.

B. Ministry

Many ministries are fairly fragile just by their nature, and will dissolve naturally if there is too much disruption. This is not necessarily a bad thing; a ministry should arise from the gifts and calling of individual believers joining together, and there will always be other opportunities to pursue for the Kingdom. But there are certain ministries, say a church plant, where it is highly desirable that the ministry should continue long term, or at least survive until the primary objective has been accomplished.

So one hopes that a long-term ministry would at least be resilient. But it would be even better if it could be antifragile. What if a church plant, upon encountering difficulties, did not fail but spawned off a second, successful ministry? What if the end result was that three cell churches were planted instead of one?

Pursuing antifragility gets trickier for a ministry, but it can be done. The easiest path is to first identify what would cause a ministry to fail if it were absent. This is not always obvious, but once identified, either the crucial elements are replaceable, or they are not. Often, in smaller ministries, they simply aren't. If you have one Evangelist, they can show you how they do what they do, and everyone can practice it, but they can't give you that spiritual gift. In that situation, we are simply back to our weakness and God's strength, and trusting that if He wills the ministry to continue, He will not let that crucial element be removed, or He will give others the ability to carry on that important part of the ministry.

On the other hand, sometimes redundancy is possible. If the ministry depends on one guy who knows how to set up sound equipment, he should teach someone else how to do it. That's an easy step.

Another important part of antifragility is to keep things from expanding out of control. If your ministry is trying to do three fairly different things, perhaps one should be spun off, with your blessing, into its own ministry. If there are people in common, they may be able to invite others to participate in the ministry and it will be a training opportunity.
The attitude is not consolidation, but multiplication.

Three tips for an antifragile ministry:
1. Be aware of what is absolutely crucial for the ministry to continue and make sure that stays in focus
2. Redundancy wherever possible
3. Keep things focused. Preference is on multiplication versus consolidation

C. Personal

This is the one most people talk about, so I'll talk about it the least. However I rarely see it coming from the perspective of one's walk with God, so there are some worthwhile issues to raise.

Once one is aware of the concept, the Bible is actually full of references to antifragility. Grape vines bear more fruit when they are pruned heavily. Jesus says that a seed cannot grow unless it dies (to being a seed), but once grown it can produce many seeds. Romans 5 speaks of the importance of suffering, which produces endurance, endurance character, and character hope. Thus suffering, something we typically try to avoid, produces the hope we are looking for. Avoiding the suffering may, surprisingly, be the reason you feel hopeless.

Therefore an attitude of embracing productive suffering, submitting willingly to the stress that causes an antifragile thing to become stronger, can produce a vital change in one's walk with God. If upon encountering difficulties, rather than asking the very natural questions that spring to mind: "Why is this happening to me? What sin is this punishment for? Does God really love me?" we can try changing the question to: "What is God teaching me through this?" In what way is this making me a better person and more effective servant for the Kingdom?" No one signs up for gym classes and then asks the instructor why he's making you suffer. The difference for Christians is that sometimes we don't realize we signed up to be made into the image of Christ.

If we recognize that letting God walk us through a series of ever-increasing challenges is precisely the process of spiritual growth He intends for us, we might even be willing to voluntarily leave our comfort zones, to ask God to lead us to tasks too big for us to handle as we are now. If comfort is our goal, we cannot grow to be more like Christ; we must embrace a certain level of discomfort in order to develop. I think that's what Paul was getting at with some of his athlete analogies: If we approach the spiritual life like an athlete approaches a marathon, the Christian life suddenly starts to make a lot of sense.

"God doesn't call us to be comfortable. He calls us to trust Him so completely that we are unafraid to put ourselves in situations where we will be in trouble if He doesn't come through." - Francis Chan

One could explore antifragility in the Christian life from innumerable other ways. (redundancy in one's personal walk, so that small things don't disrupt it; how we think of risk as believers; keeping our lives simple and flexible to serve God...) We'll save those for a future post. For now, check out the link near the top for the explanation of antifragility (actually here it is again), or find Taleb's book on Amazon if you want the full blown, way-too-much-information version.

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