(This is the second post in a 2-part series.
The first was primarily about the missions side of things, and this one is more focused on personal lessons that have come with my time on the field)
In today's post I'd like to explore 5 personal lessons I have learned or have been in the process of learning over these past 5 years. Some of these are deeply personal struggles, and I share them not to talk about myself, though self-expression is always part of a personal blog, and not as a form of emotional catharsis, but in hopes that other people can identify with and possibly be helped by some of it.
1. The Effectiveness of Simple Endurance through Time
When we are struggling through challenging times in our lives, one of the fastest ways to succumb to temptation is to start believing the thought "this is never going to end." The preemptive despair that comes with this way of thinking encourages us that current decisions don't matter when weighed against the overwhelming suffering of our mental or emotional anguish continued forward in an erroneous hypothetical straight line for the foreseeable future, like a hockey stick climate graph.
It it sometimes true that grievous or painful situations aren't going to undo themselves. Some tragedies are permanent, at least in this mortal life. However, when we say "this" is never going to end, a big part of that "this" is our mental state at the time. There's the false implication that I'll always feel about this situation the way I do now. But being time-bound creatures, that's not usually true.
It's not true that time heals all wounds. Some wounds fester with time. But when facing pain with an attitude of faithful endurance, even if all the future brings is as inadequate a solution as learning to avoid that painful spot in one's memories, that is still a very different place than the pain being fresh and comprehensive and the mistaken conviction that it's a permanent state of affairs.
Being someone who spends a bit too much time in my own head, mental anguish is particularly hard to deal with, especially being an INTP who tries to "solve" the anguish by thinking it through, leading to unhelpful rumination sometimes punctuated by the painful emotions breaking through regardless.
But one thing that can really only be learned by experience is that as time passes, things change. Although there are certainly more and less healthy ways of dealing with something by letting time pass (it takes wisdom to know when to let change happen passively and when to be proactive), if one can simply endure the storm, taking refuge in God's promises, even the biggest personal typhoons blow past eventually.
2. Internalizing a Mentality of Antifragility
If you've read many of my past posts, I am a fan of Taleb's concept of fragility vs. resilience vs. antifragility. One application of the idea can be seen in comparing glass, rubber, and living bone. A hard shock shatters fragile glass, while rubber simply bounces back and is unaffected. But broken bones can heal back with a denser structure than before at the fracture point; in response to damage the bone didn't simply return to normal, but grew stronger there.
For an even simpler example, consider the dandelion above. If a strong gale blew through a piece of land, a stiff but fragile elm tree might lose a limb or even fall over entirely, while a tough and resilient willow could bend with the wind and come out unharmed. However a patch of dandelions would actually prosper greatly by having their seeds blown across the entire countryside. (Yet a spritz of weedkiller could end them, while not greatly affecting the large trees. Everything is fragile to something)
Things to which the adjective antifragile can be applied, actually need shocks and damage to grow healthier and stronger, and peace and protection aren't helpful for growth, just as dead calm days don't help the dandelions to spread their seeds, and periods of peace and affluence can be dangerous for the Church. (I have
written in the past how the Church is an antifragile institution)
There are lots of ways this mentality can be applied (Taleb was initially focused on the stock market). But living on the mission field certainly provides ample opportunities. Consider church planting; a "fragile" ministry approach would be borrowing a lot of money to buy a large and beautiful building for a growing church to meet in. Any damage to that building is your achille's heel, and you are in a financially tenuous position. Our little church plant is more resilient, partly through its small size and relational focus; if the community center we meet in closed, we could meet in my coworker's home, or pack into my smaller apartment if necessary. Some people drop off the radar temporarily, but holiday events or special activities bring them back and can be a chance to reconnect. An antifragile model of church-planting is harder to envision in the strategic sense, though I'm working on it. (Persecution can function in that way, but I believe persecution as a church-planting model is best left to God in His infinite wisdom.)
Antifragility is also a very helpful mentality for a person doing cross-cultural ministry. Every mistake I make in the language that anyone points out is a chance to improve, for example, while no mistakes being pointed out doesn't help me even though it feels good. Likewise, every ministry approach we try and see little to no success in is a learning opportunity. Note that this is not just the ministry equivalent of seeing the silver lining or the opposite of eating bitter grapes: It's not a method of self-consolation, it drives you to try out new ways of saying things and try new ways of doing ministry so that stagnation can be avoided and growth obtained through temporary failures and setbacks.
One example of internalizing that mentality comes in is how to deal with the minor failures. If I act embarrassed or offended whenever Chinese mistakes are pointed out, that's discouraging my friends and others from pointing them out. I may save a little face, but I don't learn or grow. Instead I try to maintain and convey the opposite attitude, of a learner who appreciates being corrected. So instead of a "silver lining" approach where at least through making mistakes I learn something, I want and welcome those corrections.
The same is true for ministry work. If I focus on results and how well the church plant or a particular ministry is going, I may get discouraged and feel I'm not a good enough church planter when things don't go according to plan, spiritual fruit seems scanty, or attendance is low. If on the other hand I remember that I'm learning how to plant a whole new church in Taiwan, a difficult task that a fairly small number of people currently alive have experience in, then it's clear that trial and error is absolutely necessary to grow.
In that context, things that don't work well, or even unpleasant surprises, are helpful in ways that things which go smoothly can't be. Recently I've been increasingly able to recognize when setbacks are not just the way life/ministry goes, but are actually helpful progress or even blessings that I would have missed if I'd not changed my mentality in this way.
3. Progress in the Battle against Procrastination
My list of life achievements reads well, but I've missed out on a lot of potentially fun opportunities and experiences along the way. This is partly because I'm an introvert (and that fun weekend trip sounds great but I have a stack of books and some hot tea on standby to recharge my batteries), but probably more so because I have often been plagued by procrastination. I could always get the important things done, for example an important paper in seminary, but by not arranging my time well early on, and waiting too late to start, it wouldn't be a good representation of my paper writing capabilities because I didn't give myself enough time.
Or so I thought. Actually it was an excellent representation of my paper writing capabilities, because being able to start the writing in a timely fashion counts as part of those capabilities. This is a huge realization I've had in the past few years; there is no hypothetical talent. Thinking that someone who is great at writing but never applies themselves is a tragic waste is only somewhat true; if they can't make themselves write they're not great at writing. Or perhaps one could more accurately say they are great at writing snippets and bits of things, but that's a pretty common talent, actually. Whatever wherewithal great writers possessed to actually get lots of words on paper wasn't the "final step" in their talent but a crucial component of it.
At some point I realized my procrastination, when it kicked in automatically, was largely due to a kind of reflexive perfectionism. I don't want to reply to that work email yet, I want to think about precisely how to craft my response. I don't want to message that person and see about meeting tonight, I didn't sleep well last night and don't want to come across as frazzled or my Chinese to be subpar because my brain is too tired.
It took a combination of patiently using logic with myself and some life experience to recognize that other people's expectations aren't that high. They don't want a precisely phrased email in which I have communicated exactly what I want to say including the right connotations, they just want a basic reply to their query and may not spend any time analyzing it enough to notice the connotations at all (They don't have INTP velociraptors that chew on whatever ideas other people bring up). The way I come across when tired isn't all that different from how I normally come across, and most people don't care that much either way. Etc. Etc.
I also realized that trying to be perfectionistic about certain things meant they consumed time that should be allotted for higher priority tasks, and it also kept certain processes stuck and delayed that I could have been benefiting from all along had I settled for an "adequate" step B and continued on to C and beyond.
I'm still fighting this battle, but this past year especially I've made a lot of progress. Writing this section feels a little vulnerable and is certainly humbling (it seems silly to be like this compared to many other people who just do things and get on with their lives) but I hope it may be helpful to other people who struggle with similar tendencies.
4. Improving Goal-focus with Goal-awareness
Despite dealing with the issues described above, I am a very goal-oriented person and this has helped me do some things that required long-term focus and determination. I have also found along the way that while big, long-term goals tend to stay out in front of us, it's easy to lose focus of smaller goals in the process of daily life.
To use a humorous but perhaps very relevant example, I have always had trouble remembering people's names. I might meet several people at a party or event and come away remembering small details about our conversations and things they mentioned about themselves, but only remembering the names of 2 or 3 of them.
There are lots of tips floating around for getting better at this, and my problem isn't a bad memory. It's that I don't set a little goal of remembering the person's name ahead of time. Whatever little mental prompt that ought to be there doesn't happen automatically. All it takes is a brief self-reminder to register each person's name when they say it, then confirm it at some point later. If I can remember to do that, the names are not a big problem.
This can be true in our spiritual life too. When temptation beckons, or when we're tempted to skip a Bible reading or have a bad attitude about something, sometimes all we need is a moment of awareness--is this my goal? In the story of my life, is this how I'm choosing today's page to read?
5. Stepping through Anxiety into Faith
Being a very goal-oriented person as mentioned above, I have frequently struggled with anxiety. I have found that anxiety has an almost purely physical component which I'm susceptible to (gut health issues, etc. Though that's kind of a chicken-egg problem) but is also connected with the process of setting and reaching difficult future goals.
Anxiety arises in that distance between your good goal or destination and your lack of certainty about your ability to reach it. It's as if stepping from one stone to another across a fast-moving river (with a waterfall immediately downstream), you can only do it in slow motion, and the stone your foot is descending toward keeps wavering in and out of existence.
In that kind of situation, with the anxiety gathering like storm clouds full of electrical potential, any incident, thought, or situation can act like the tall tree or building which brings down the lightning of panicky thoughts and in more serious cases can even activate the fight-or-flight reflex.
For me, setting a big and long-term goal like "I'm going to be a long-term missionary in Taiwan" is easier than it is for some other people. I can take a goal like that and break it down into a strategy for getting there, and feel confident that each step along the way that relies on me can either be accomplished straightforwardly, or I can learn how to. (Having been homeschooled does help with that mentality, I think--I know I can teach myself what I need to know as long as the information is available)
But that very determination to reach a far-off and worthy goal means saying, to that part of you that wants to be tired, that wants to change to a more comfortable or easier goal, that isn't sure you're cut out to live so consistently outside your comfort zone, that wants to remind you of all the things outside your control that could happen to ruin your goal, that it needs to either cooperate or keep silent. It means thrusting down doubts or nervousness and moving forward step by step. But those doubts and nervousness and exhaustion don't always really go away. Sometimes they sink down into your unconscious, and take revenge later in the form of irrational anxiety.
I have learned, then, for someone who struggles with anxiety, your gut is not always to be listened to. That deep feeling of certainty, correctness, or warning, that any intuitively-minded person is familiar with, can be hijacked by anxiety and turn into a false alarm beacon warning that something is deeply wrong when nothing is more wrong than usual. The more you try to use logic and rational thinking to calm yourself down, the more that haywire intuition insists that you wouldn't need to be doing that if something wasn't already wrong.
But your gut is another form of intelligence too. Even for people with strong anxiety, it's not a good rule of thumb to simply always do the opposite of what your gut is saying. Thus there is another kind of wisdom one must cultivate; to know when your gut's alarm bells are giving you an important warning, and when it's just burnt popcorn.
That wisdom can grow, put down roots, and produce fruit, under the bright light of faith. Some people facing anxiety and uncertainty try to have faith "in the universe," that on the whole there's a kind of big goodness out there, or a sort of automatic karma calculator, which will help things work out for you as often as not, especially if you can keep a positive attitude. (New Age thinking, but it's so prevalent now that the adjective is outdated.)
But the universe doesn't have its own consciousness, and it's not your friend. Indeed, an argument often used against Christianity is the painful and seemingly nihilistic experiences many humans endure during their short (and often foreshortened) lives. You can't swerve from this to immediately claiming faith can have "the goodness of humanity" or "the positivity of the universe" as its object.
The perplexing nature of our world that can contain such beauty and such pain simultaneously is one reason I am a Christian. While the Bible does not explain many things we are curious about, it does explain exactly how the world arrived at this paradoxical state of interposed pleasure and suffering, beauty and ugliness, hope and despair. Anxiety comes from living in this kind of world, while maintaining worthy goals you strive to achieve despite uncertainty and recognizing many events are beyond your control.
Anxiety is not necessarily a lack of faith, then, although increasing faith is a good remedy for it. It can sometimes just be an overcharged recognition that the world is not okay, and it doesn't actually have any safety rails, only well-worn tracks and wilder cliffs that are no sure guarantee of security or danger. Yet, we still have to live in it, and with some amount of courage we can live with joy too.
Anxiety-prone people don't really have the choice to suddenly become that kind of person whose happiness partly stems from not contemplating possibilities, though as I mentioned there are physical aspects which can be improved. Perhaps more accurately, I don't want to shift "sideways" from being something who overthinks things, to someone who has figured out how not to think about things as much. I want to progress on, in faith, to being someone who can use overthinking for God's glory, but has the trust and courage to not suffer the side effects of anxiety, etc. These years God has given me some valuable puzzle pieces, which have helped me see the bigger picture, and step out of the back-and-forth struggle of trying to solve anxiety by thinking my way through it.
One step on the path to overcoming anxiety for me was thus a sort of Molon Labe*; yes my life could be uprooted and my goals undone at any point by events beyond my control, but I choose to wait until that happens and let it be a nasty shock that I deservedly experience grief and anger over, and not live in that anxiety ahead of time, as if that will somehow lessen the pain if the shock ever comes.
(* The famous Spartan response to the Persian Emperor's demand to surrender their weapons -- "Take them, if you can succeed in coming to do so")
Do people cling to anxiety for that reason, believing it's somehow paying down the deposit of future pain? I don't know, though at times I felt that was the unspoken lie I was being told. But I do know we can choose instead to climb out of our foxholes and run forward, even though life is like a battlefield where many soldiers don't survive based on their skill at arms but on where the enemy arrows or mortar shells shot into the sky randomly come down or don't. Because God is there, and all shall be well, even if an arrow strikes down into the middle of your goals, or health, or even life.
I am still making my way across that river, and on the mission field the stepping stones are not always clear. Sometimes it feels more like you have to wait for a log to float down the stream to make any forward progress. But each step is a step away from ignorance about the painful reality of life on this earth, not into despair or into comfortable apathy, but toward the firm foundation of faith that "whatever my lot, Thou has taught me to say, it is well, it is well with my soul."
It is well.
