Selective Naivety

I've been wrestling with something over the last week. The first part of this post is a lot of raw truth, otherwise known as venting. But there is a teensy bit of light at the end, some slowly-dawning revelations.

It all started when Natalie sent a link to her friend Julie's blog. A beautifully written blog by a Christian woman in a similar life phase as mine. (Two little kids, slightly younger than mine.)

Her posts are incredibly upbeat. She expresses joy over the rain. She writes a valentine to her husband, who comes off like a kinder, more loving and generous version of Brad Pitt + Johnny Depp + Jon Hamm all rolled into one. She writes about going from a size 12 to a size 2, all through the love of Jesus (not that she cares about her dress size one bit, since she cares only about God now). She writes about her father's suicide (!), stating only the bare fact of it before launching into a heartfelt praise of God, who stood by her through the ordeal. The way she describes it hardly sounds like an ordeal, though. It's more like just one more opportunity to celebrate God. And her most recent post describes the joy she feels at God's helping her to overcome fear of losing her husband Ryan during his mission trip to the Middle East.

I read her posts, and I thought: She lost her dad to suicide (think of all that this implies, eternally speaking!); she's juggling a preschooler, a toddler and a third pregnancy; and her husband has chosen THIS moment to leave the family and travel into a dangerous country to evangelize (which means that he is, in effect, tempting the dangerous thugs to target him). What a cruel and irresponsible thing to do, sitting her down mere months after her father's death, and showing her the life insurance paperwork in case he loses his life overseas, on a dangerous trip he chose to take!

One of my real struggles with the Christian faith is my reaction to Christians. For me, especially in my writing, I put a high premium on presenting situations as truthfully as possible. I'm the opposite of a sugar-coater; if a passage is too rosy, I'll balance it out with a concession.  There are checks and balances: Missions are a good thing, of course, but so is being around for one's family. Faith and common sense don't have to be mutually exclusive. And being a cheerleader for your husband is a good thing, but there must be a boundary there, too, wherein you keep yourself from being his doormat.

Then I read the NGM book, For Women Only. The book ladled out the same old obvious facts that I already knew. Respect your husband. Have sex with him often. Affirm him constantly, because his ego is fragile. The book, however, doesn't address what to do when your husband needs correction. (For a Christian woman who sees her husband as perfect, this wouldn't be necessary, of course. That's why Christian women who blog about their perfect husbands don't encourage me.)

What do you do when you believe that his bad money decisions need to NOT be affirmed, because they're not smart? What to do when you feel that his fragile ego and his selfishness combine in the ugliest of ways, putting you and your children at risk? Affirm him anyway. Respect his decisions. Have lots of sex. And trust that God will work it all out. Great, thanks for nothing.

All week, my heart was burdened with these negative thoughts. I couldn't shake them. I felt like I was wrong, like I was acting out. But I also couldn't line myself up with what was right. It's not enough to realize that I'm wrong. I need to be convinced that the other way is right. Or more to the point, not just right but intellectually adequate, too.

On Saturday morning, I woke up with an idea. What if I crafted a blog that described my circumstances truthfully, but not altogether truthfully? What if I wrote it from the perspective of my alternate self, someone who loves God and purposely sees everything through His viewpoint? It wouldn't be raw and honest, but it could still be what's going on. Just from a different perspective.

At church on Sunday, Tim spoke on the passage in Mark when Jesus meets the woman at the well. There had been longstanding conflict and hatred between the Jews and the Samaritans, who now had no dealings with one another. But Jesus disregards this. He just starts talking to her. Next Tim quoted a theologian's commentary about the passage. "It is as though Jesus were oblivious to the divisions that separated the two peoples."

"Notice he didn't say that Jesus was oblivious to the divisions," Tim explained. "He said 'It was as though he were oblivious.'"

Here was Jesus, still smart, still knowing, but acting as though the negative cultural issues around him didn't exist. This seemed like a message aimed straight at me. Tim called later that day, and I told him about what I've been wrestling with, and how maybe God was talking to me through his sermon.

Tim is my kind of Christian. He noted first that Julie-with-the-perfect-husband might not be showing all her cards, and that Christians who are more raw (like me) can be better witnesses in some situations. But he also brought up the term "selective naivety," and it put a label on what I was mulling over the day before. You can be selectively naive about how you describe and react to your circumstances, choosing to acknowledge the God angle and not the side of things that, while true, isn't necessarily helpful. This doesn't mean you're checking your brain at the door; you're just looking at the situation in a different way.


Last night I asked Lee if he could set up the blog section of our family's website, so that I can start writing it. He said that would be easy to do. Its unspoken title will be Selective Naivety.