Don't United Airlines Yourself

1. A Debacle for United:

Just a short entry today. I am not the kind of blogger who often pounces on the social media news scandal de jour, but in this case we have been flashed with a 10,000 watt, unpleasantly vivid object lesson.

Here's the basics (click the link above for more details and the video):

Needing to transfer 4 airline staff to another airport on an overbooked flight, United Airlines requested some passengers to volunteer to take another flight later, with compensation. Nothing special there. But after raising it to $800 and no one volunteering, UA announced they would select passengers at random with a computer. One passenger, a doctor, insisted it was important for him to make the flight to see patients later, and would not leave the plane. He was eventually dragged off the plane, face getting bloodied in the process, in an ugly spectacle that shocked watching passengers.

At this point it's irrelevant whether or not his behavior was reasonable or not, as the film of him being dragged from the plane is all over the internet. My FB feed is covered in darkly humorous UA memes, every post representing tens of thousands of dollars of people taking any other airline but UA, and a tone-deaf pseudo-response from United Airline's CEO is only making things worse.

It's already quite obvious that this is an absolute public relations nightmare for United Airlines. At best, this escalates into legal action which results in passengers actually retaining their civil rights on an airplane, which is currently not the case, practically speaking.

Just imagine the exchange next time United calls for passengers to take another flight.. "Or else what, you'll beat us up and drag us off the plane?"

"Oops" - Rick Perry

2. A Lesson for Us:

While it's true that, if more people suffer for this very poor judgment call in the coming days, it's likely to be the employees of United (and not likely the ham-handedly or apathetically unapologetic CEO), let us at least consider the important lesson for us here which should not be ignored:

Unwilling to offer a few hundred more dollars for people to voluntarily give up their seats, United Airlines has incurred a public relations scandal which is going to cost them millions at best, probably more.

So consider this: are you doing the same thing to yourself right now?

For the sake of stubbornly or lazily being unwilling to pay whatever cost would be necessary to overcome some small obstacles in your life, are you hurting yourself in deep and significant ways over the long term?

What things would take merely some unpleasant effort in the near-term, require spending some money you don't want to spend, in order to avoid big problems down the road? Living in Taiwan, I can think of at least three things I need to stop procrastinating on, three hurdles I need to jump, which would make my life easier in the long run and save me from future problems. Not ministry things, but things which would put me in a better position from which to minister.

One fairly mundane example would be how I've balked at spending the money and time necessary to get a real water filter installed. Bottled water is cheap here, and the tap water won't make you sick (in the short term... the water is okay, but the pipes in various areas are not, leading to nebulous health issues which are difficult to prove are from the water but many local people believe it to be so), but either way there are obvious reasons why being having a filter for the tap is preferable, if only so that I can offer a glass of water to visitors worried about water quality. I've just been putting it off as a fairly expensive and troublesome item that there's never a good time to stop everything else and do.

(Now having blogged about it I guess I'll need to pester myself into doing it.)

3. Do Not Withhold...

If that seems like a stretch to get to from the United Airlines situation, it's much less so than it seems. We often undermine ourselves by focusing on our current disinclination to do something, even though there are big potential downsides which are only possible when we don't do it. This is especially true when it's a question of paying other people. You may seem to have spared yourself a bit of time or money or effort, but you may have lost much more.

United Airlines never imagined that an unwillingness to pay what they considered unnecessarily high compensation amounts to passengers would result in such a scandal, yet being unwilling to do so has cost them greatly. (Or, if you argue that the airline shouldn't have to submit to passengers holding out for the maximum compensation allowed by law, consider that they could have avoided the situation altogether by not overbooking the flight to begin with.) Again, this makes the forcibly deplaned passenger's behavior or motives irrelevant. I'd be willing to bet you the amount involved that someone on that plane who wouldn't get off for $800, would have done so for $1,300. We can't know for sure, of course, because they never made the offer, resorting to force instead.

This is less a slippery slope argument (for want of a nail the shoe was lost, for want of a shoe the horse, the rider, the kingdom, etc) and more an observation that when we establish a pattern of declining to expend time, money, or effort when it's appropriate to do so, we may hurt others and ourselves too.

For United Airlines, that was stopping well short of what they could have offered passengers because they knew they could force people off instead. Well, that backfired.

So, pay for the maintenance. Go get the check up. Practice for the certification. Tip the server appropriately. Don't shortchange yourself or other people when it's not necessary.

As Scripture says it: "Do not withold good from those to whom it is due, when it is in your power to do it." (Proverbs 3:27)

That includes yourself too. Who knows what trouble you're saving yourself from.

Lessons Learned for an INTP on the Mission Field: "Shut Up and Listen"

I have learned, and re-learned, a variety of lessons in the past 7 weeks I've been in Taiwan.

Chinese lessons from my last time in Taiwan. As hard as they sometimes are,
language lessons are probably the easiest lessons you learn on the field.

 

I've learned why there were more firecrackers going off in our community several days after Chinese New Year than there actually are on Chinese New Year's Eve night (They're set off in front of businesses as the work starts again for the new year, to ward off bad luck and evil spirits, even for those business owners who don't strictly believe in the spirit part).

I've learned that there are numerous Quaker churches all around the world, and Taiwan has quite a few. (The most are in... Kenya!)

I've re-learned that the subway doors open on the other side for a particular station on the metro line that runs nearest to where I live.

On a more relevant note:

I've learned that transitioning into an altered identity as a physically obvious outsider who still participates in Taiwanese culture to an as-yet-unsure-extent will be both easier and harder than I thought.

I'm still learning which friendships survived the years of my absence from Taiwan and which haven't.

I'm learning that God wills my good more than I wish for my own good.

One of the most important lessons, though, has required regular reminders.
That lesson is, to shut up and listen.


When I think I already know what someone is saying, shut up and listen.
When someone is telling me something about Taiwanese culture I learned the first time I came, shut up and listen.
When someone is saying anything I know is incorrect (and it's not harming anyone), at least at the beginning, shut up and listen.
When other people are talking about something and I know the answer they are trying to think of, shut up and listen.

More subtly, in Taiwanese culture, when someone asks me for my opinion, sometimes it's still better to not say much. Wait long enough for others to speak.

This is not difficult for some wonderful people because they are loving, humble, don't care about being regarded as a consistently accurate and reliable source of information, and often care about concrete things more than abstractions. God has been answering my long-term prayers to become a little more like those people, though I still have a long way to go.

In the Myers-Briggs personality system (MBTI), I am an INTP. One of the notable features of this personality type is the ongoing automatic quest to assimilate all the knowledge around us and construct a model of reality with it. It's not something I can really stop, and not something I -should- stop; it's a gift God gave me that He intends me to use in His service.

But when not put under the yoke of the 1st and 2nd Greatest Commandments, this drive to obtain, categorize, and synthesize knowledge becomes sinful, and can lead me to think of people more in the abstract and less as eternal persons created and loved by God, or simply to give more thought to the information in someone's communication than demonstrate love and respect for that person.
It doesn't happen all the time, but it does happen.

Worse, when paired with my spiritual gift of teaching, when not kept in check it can go altogether awry, and I begin to mistakenly think my job is to make sure everyone has views on the world as accurate as my meticulously fact-checked and continuously updated and synthesized model of reality. This tends to result in (especially after too much coffee) unsuspecting friends or coworkers being the subject of a massive, very detailed information dump, which is rarely helpful to them. To their credit, they are often obligingly patient.

(Some of you may be laughing now, having experienced it. I can offer a retroactive apology but unfortunately cannot promise it won't ever happen again.)

Godly Example Story: The first time I lived in Taiwan, there was a nearly-retired missionary who I accompanied in various ministries. As a new arrival, I was busy soaking up Taiwan cultural knowledge, and at one point this missionary made a statement which based on something I had recently learned seemed to be incorrect. I pointed out the error and he simply said "well, you may be right." Later I realized that he had been right, and I was wrong, and he probably knew that. But rather than prioritizing "setting the record straight" and making sure I acknowledged that he was, in fact, correct, instead he simply let it go. That made a deep impression on me at the time, and I am trying to follow that example.

There's a great verse in Proverbs that talks about shutting yourself up when necessary:

"If you have been foolish, exalting yourself, or if you have been devising evil, put your hand on your mouth." Proverbs 30:32

(My air filter mask for bad air days and motorscooter rides works fairly well too.)

As a man who fears God (in the sense of being overwhelmed by His glory and majesty, and awareness that only the redemption made possible by Jesus Christ stands between myself and all-too-deserved judgment), I don't tend to find myself devising evil. Self-exaltation can be more subtle, however. We don't grow out of that quickly, it just takes on more and more outwardly appealing forms, like praising others and the false sort of humility.

But in those moments when I might be about to be foolish, may God keep reminding me to shut up and listen to what He's saying to me, both in the silence of His presence and the wisdom of others around me.

Hope you are all well and blessed.