Reflections on the Community of Baseball Fans

I want to write about something entirely different today. I want to write about baseball. We are getting closer and closer to Opening Day, and my Philadelphia Phillies have undergone a massive transformation this winter. Almost half of the guys who will presumably be in the lineup on Opening Day were not with the team last year. Naturally all of these changes have led to a great deal of optimism, and I hope that the optimism is justified. After a disappointing finish to last season with a nearly historic collapse, all of these changes will hopefully be enough to put us over the edge and push us into the playoffs.

Notice how I lapsed into discussing myself as part of the team. I am in no way part of the team. It is not even like they are the Green Bay Packers where you can purchase shares of the team. I have no ownership interest in the Philadelphia Phillies. I have never played for them or been associated with them. The closest I have ever been to them was thanks to the Make-A-Wish foundation when I was able to meet several players and go on the field. However, that does not establish any type of relationship between me and the organization, yet I still refer to myself like I am somehow part of the team.

I have noticed a lot of people do this when they talk about sports in particular. There is some identification as part of the team even if you are not at all related to the team beyond being a supporter. Why do we identify ourselves as part of a greater community that is practically artificial? I will not be pushed into the playoffs no matter how well anybody on the Phillies actually plays. I will be cheering for a team that gets pushed into the playoffs, but I am not part of that team. My supporting them has functionally no impact on their success. In fact, their success also has very little impact on my life. Beyond inspiring me to purchase World Series Champions memorabilia and a general feeling of everything being right in the world, this type of success would really not change my life whatsoever. That being said, I still identify with the success that this team has and feel like it is part of my own success in some way.

Maybe I am reading far too much into this expression that a lot of us use, but I think there is something there. We all desire to be part of a greater community. We want to think that our support matters to our baseball team. We want to think that they appreciate the fact that we specifically cheer for them out of all the other teams that we could possibly be cheering for. I am in New England. Most people around here cheer for the Boston Red Sox. I like to think that the Phillies appreciate the knowledge that they have at least one family of fans in Vermont.

Of course they certainly economically have an interest in the fact that people support them, but again, I like to think that they want me to cheer for them. I like to think that they want me specifically to be a part of the team.

Why do we have this desire then to be part of this type of social group? What is it about desiring community that speaks to us on a deeper level that we create it even where it doesn’t really seem to be all that relevant?

Over time, you all have seen me write a lot about community and what a difference it makes. We are created for community. We are created to associate with other people and to come together around common goals. We find our similar passions, and we strive together. Is any coincidence that God tells people to not forsake assembling together? He designed us, and He knows that we crave relationships with other people.

A little while ago I saw a news story that detailed the serious health problems associated with isolation. At the end of the day, we do not do well if we are not coming together with other people.

Consequently, we find community even in things that are not incredibly serious. I love sports, and the Phillies are my favorite team. However, even I realize that sports are not the end of all things. They are important to me, but certainly there are tons of things that are more important. Nevertheless, I like to feel like I am part of the community around the Philadelphia Phillies.

You even get that feeling when you go to the ballpark. When my family has gone to games in Philadelphia, we don’t go with anyone that we know. That being said, it is not all that uncommon to end up talking to the ushers or other fans who you run into around the stadium about this shared interest. You can always find someone to commiserate with about the latest loss or celebrate the most recent victory. You have no idea who these people are, but there is some common ground that brings you together and makes you feel like you belong.

Our desire for belonging must be incredibly powerful for a game to bring us together. We must really desire community if we will voluntarily form them around a leisure activity. We build our tribe, and we like it. We find our common enemy a.k.a. the New York Mets, and we like to oppose them. It is us versus them, and we want the good guys to triumph over the bad guys. And then we remember it is still just a game, but we put so much stock into it that it really is remarkable. Like I said, this desire for community must be really powerful if it matters that much.

As we start to move into baseball season in the very near future then, I have to remind myself of a few things. First, community is wonderful. Voluntarily associating with other people who share a common interest is a great thing. It is consistent with the way that we are designed, and if I am satisfying a God-given desire, then I think that is important. Even though a baseball community is certainly not the most important type of community we can be part of (the Christian community is infinitely more important; make sure you are part of that family if you are not already), it is still a societal good. Just like it is good to belong to your local singing group and enjoy community there, being a part of a larger community of baseball fans is similarly a good thing.

Second, isolation is dangerous. You might hate baseball. You are tragically wrong, but that may describe you. Find a community. Find something you’re passionate about and voluntarily become a part of it. If you are a Christian, obviously the local church is where that begins. If you are not a Christian, become a Christian and find a church. If you are still not quite willing to do that based on my amazingly persuasive argumentation in that previous sentence, there are still remarkable benefits to finding community. Get involved in local theater. Join a book club. Volunteer at a soup kitchen. Do something that helps you get around people who are committed to a similar cause. It matters.

Third, don’t fall prey to the myth of individualism. In America, we talk a lot about being self-made people. We stand on our own two feet, and we don’t need anyone else. Independence is a good thing, and we do have to have a certain degree of it. However, we are deceiving ourselves if we don’t think that we need other people around us. Don’t think any less of yourself for wanting to be with other people. In fact, exhibiting that desire proves that you are part of God’s wonderful creation, the human race. It is not good for man to be alone. The fact that you feel that desire as well is highly consistent with your nature. Therefore, don’t be ashamed of it or hide it. Don’t think that you are being tough and rugged because you don’t need anybody else. Embrace your humanity. That is a good thing.

As we begin baseball season in the near future, I really would encourage you to use it as an opportunity to think about community. As I cheer for my team (that is not even really my team whatsoever), I identify with them. I am happy when they are happy, and I hope that I will be happy a lot this summer. Maybe it seems weird that we care about these things, but I think it actually shines a light on our humanity. That is a good thing, and while it is not the most important thing we can do, it is nevertheless significant. Find what you are passionate about and join that community.

What the Washington Post Debacle Can Teach Christians

What is one of the first things you learn about socializing in middle school? There are some people that will tell just about any story they hear. It doesn’t so much matter if the story is true or false. The minute they hear it, they want to tell someone. These are naturally the people that you learn not to tell secrets to, but the funny thing is that they do not even need your true secrets to start spreading stories. They will tell whatever they think they know or might have overheard thirdhand.

Why do they do this? They like to be the ones to tell the story first. They want to get all of the popularity, prying questions and attention for knowing something that no one else knows.

The problem is that sometimes they are entirely wrong. They tell stories that are nothing more than false gossip. It hurts someone’s reputation for the time being, but eventually, that person gets their life back when the truth is revealed. Over time, the gossiper is exposed for what he or she is. People start to learn not to trust that person. After you are wrong enough, people simply stop listening.

This is something we all learn in middle school. I’m sure you were there at some point. Maybe it hit reality for you in high school or college, but you have all been there. There are people who just want to have a story to tell, and truth is a secondary concern. We know how to react to people like that. We just stop listening eventually, or we take what they say with a great deal of caution because we know it very well might not be true.

Why then, if this is something that we all understand literally from our preteen years, does it seem like our media had a hard time grasping this concept?

You all have probably heard about the Washington Post being sued for their coverage of the Covington High School debacle. They ran the story before they had a responsible amount of facts, and they ended up having to post this editorial essentially apologizing for their negligence.

Of course, it took a great deal of time to post a correction, and they posted it late on a Friday afternoon, after the majority of the weekly news cycle was done. They are not fools. They knew what they were doing. They were apologizing because they had to, but they tried to do so in the least damaging way possible.

How much different is this than middle school? Maybe that pressure to be the popular kid who broadcasted the story first got to them. Maybe the desire to find a story that fit into a particular narrative and made them even more popular was too tempting. I don’t know why they did what they did. They are professional journalists, and they should know better regardless of what the motivation was.

I’m not so much worried about going to the nuts and bolts of everything that the Washington Post did wrong. You can find plenty of other websites that talk about that, and that is not really what I am trying to focus on. They are, for our purposes, a cautionary tale of what we need to avoid as Christians.

There are similarly basic things that we learn in our Christian lives. It is kind of like how you learn the basics of not becoming the chief gossip in middle school. These are skills that we develop, and in our Christian lives, they help us start down the road towards being like Christ. They are the fundamental building blocks that we try to build on top of. As we grow and mature, we hopefully continue doing better and better. That is the beauty of the Christian walk. It is a journey where hopefully we get closer and closer to our destination as we continue learning.

However, sometimes we might be walking along just fine. We might be working hard. We might feel like we are getting closer to God, and that is a wonderful thing. However, we find ourselves doing things that we know we shouldn’t do. Like I said, we all know that the professional journalists at the Washington Post know better. Even outside of just the life experience that teaches us not to be the gossiper who runs without news, they have been professionally trained, and there is no reason that their judgment should lapse like it did.

How often do I judge my own Christian life by the same standard though? I became a Christian as a very young child. I am nowhere near perfect by any means, but I would say that in the over two decades that I have been on this journey, I certainly have a more mature faith than I had when I was a child. The comparison is not perfect to the staff of the Washington Post, but I think you can see the similarity here. I realize how bad it is when they mess up at their jobs, but I often times brush off my own shortcomings about much more eternally significant things.

Of course God will forgive me. That is not the question here, and that is not what I am worried about per se. I am grateful for His graciousness and mercy. Rather, I am more worried about my own tendencies to not take my own shortcomings as seriously as I take other people’s.

Jesus talked about taking the log out of your own eye before you worry about the spec in someone else’s. This verse is often times taken out of context to mean that we can never speak truth to anyone else until we are perfect. Of course, since none of us are ever going to be perfect, the implication is that we never should speak truth. There is no way that is what Jesus was implying by this passage. However, the point is well taken that we need to remember that self-reflection is necessary for the Christian. We need to take our own sins seriously.

This is not about letting people off the hook or failing to hold people responsible. That is also a necessary part of the Christian life. We have to help people see the truth whenever we can with love and kindness. However, I hope that in our lives, we can remember that even as mature Christians, we can mess up on the basics. We can fail Journalism 101 like the Washington Post did. When that happens, we don’t want to be the ones who fail to own up to our mistakes. Instead, we want to be the ones who go directly to God, confess our sins and ask for forgiveness. When we hide it, like Jonah, it often times gets dragged out in particularly unpleasant ways. The Washington Post is feeling that right now. If they had just reported responsibly the first time, I would not be making this comparison in this blog post because it wouldn’t be valid. It wouldn’t make sense.

I think we need to have a few practical applications steps before we wrap this up.

First, let’s make sure that we are moving in the right direction. Obviously, we have to learn those life lessons early. Like you learn things about gossiping in middle school and what happens to people who tell stories that turn out to be false, our Christian life starts with learning some foundational truths about the way the world is. Let’s make sure that we have at least made that decision. Let’s make sure that we are walking after God before we move on. That is eternally important.

Second, let’s make sure that we are watching out for motivations to fall away. We have to be cautious. There are plenty of ways for us to lose our way. Like the Washington Post must’ve felt, there are definitely pressures on us to do the wrong thing, even if it seems to have some accompanying benefits. We need to have the strength to stay the course and not compromise for short-term gain.

Third, it is important for us to own up to our mistakes. The Washington Post story is made worse by the fact that it was only pulled out of them by the threat of legal action. Let’s be better than that in our own personal lives.

This is a tough topic for a lot of people, but it is important. We find it really easy to criticize other people. Sometimes that criticism is justified when it is done with love. However, we also need to be very sure that we look at our own lives just as often, if not more often. If we don’t, we are going to be crippling ourselves, our witness and ultimately our effectiveness in the kingdom of God. As Christians, that ought to be the last thing we want to do. Shall we do better than going forward? I hope the answer is yes.

Enjoying Your God-Given Freedom

I went to a concert last weekend in Springfield, Massachusetts. Casting Crowns headlined the show with Austin French and Zach Williams opening. I love seeing Casting Crowns in concert, and part of the reason that I love listening to them so much is because I already know a majority of the music before I even enter the hall. Admittedly, I don’t listen to Austin French or Zach Williams all that often, so they were a little bit of a newer experience for me, but I was struck by a common theme in their music. They were singing about freedom.

For quick reference, check out French’s Freedom Hymn or Williams’ Chain Breaker. For that matter, when you extend this theme to Crowns, you can check out songs like Voice of Truth or Who Am I. There is a lot of talk about freedom in Christianity.

I know what you are probably going to say in response though. We all get it. There are things in our lives that seem to hold us back. I have heard it even from people who just live in Vermont. You ask them why they are here, and they talk about how they are stuck here for one reason or another. Maybe their parents need them to be around, or maybe they just don’t have the financial resources to make that kind of change. They don’t have a way out, but they don’t particularly like where they are.

For other people, you might hear about people being stuck in their jobs. They don’t like them, but they feel like they don’t have options. They feel trapped. You can probably make lists of things that people feel tied down by. They feel like there is no way out, and they feel like they have to stay where they are. In short, they do not feel free.

We can even take this beyond the physical. People feel trapped spiritually. Do you have some type of sin that you always fall back into try as you might to get away from it? Is there that one bad habit that you really don’t want to have, but you can’t seem to shake it? Since none of us are perfect, I think that we can all say that we have these things in our lives. Maybe you have a bad temper. You try to do well, but it slips out every now and then. Maybe you have some type of idol in your life that is standing in the way of your relationship with God. You want to be tight with God, but something is just interfering with that progress.

Maybe that is you today. You simply don’t feel like you have the ability to break away either physical chains or more spiritual ones. You are clearly the type of person that these songs are reaching out to. It is a message that we all need to hear. God brings freedom.

This is contrary to popular opinion though. Most people will say that you shouldn’t be shackled to religion. They will say that religion is something that holds you down and actually takes away your freedom. They will say that God is just a myth meant to make you complacent. You are just consuming the opiate of the masses.

It seems strange to me, however, to consider our human condition this way. We are actually in greater bondage when we are separated from God. The Bible says that we are dead in our sins. There is functionally no changing death from within. If you have a dead body, it is not working. It does not have the power to bring itself back. It needs intervention from the outside. It is simply going to remain dead. There is no freedom in that.

When the power of God intervenes and brings you back to life, look at all the possibilities that are now available because you are alive. You certainly have the ability to do things that you did when you are dead. Without getting too morbid or graphic, you could lay down in a hole if you wanted to while you are alive. That being said, you would probably not do that because there are tons of better things that you can do now that you are alive. You can do so many great things to help so many other people. It is very much like what the apostle Paul said about everything being permissible but not expedient for the believer. God has given us the freedom to pursue His will, and we ought to take advantage of that by doing the things that we can only do while we are alive. We should do what God designed us to do. It is amazing to think about the privilege we have to do that.

I know that you might not be buying any of this. My example may not have made any sense to you. As much as I think most of us feel like there are some things that are holding us down, you might reflexively deny it. You might say that you don’t want this kind of freedom. You are perfectly happy the way you are. Even the things aren’t perfect, you don’t see how adding God to the equation can somehow give you a type of freedom that you don’t feel now. After all, you are presumably an adult if you are reading this, and most of you are probably from America. You probably feel like you have a great deal of freedom. You still don’t get why this might make a difference in your life.

I guess the best thing I can tell you in that case then is that the freedom that God gives is the type of freedom that takes you away from any standard you might feel like you have put upon you. You feel like you are wasting your life because you aren’t where you want to be in your career. That doesn’t worry God. He has you where He wants you for a purpose, and He is watching out for you. He will open the doors that are meant just for you. You are not a failure for God. Measured by God’s standards, you are His child. That’s what matters.

You might feel like you are a terrible person because you keep slipping into a certain sin. God doesn’t minimize our sin, and it is a serious violation that separates us from Him, but He will forgive our sins when we genuinely confess them and ask for it. This is not some kind of license to sin, but it is rather mercy of God made evident. And, your sins are washed away, and you are made white as snow. How crazy is that? You are not a failure in God’s eyes. You are still His valuable child. He might discipline you like parents discipline an unruly child, but you are still His. The world might be quick to call you a failure when you screw up. God doesn’t apply that kind of standard. You are still His child. That’s what matters.

When you see the world in this way, it really changes everything. There is a great deal of freedom. With the rest of the world, you feel like you’re walking on eggshells. You mess up one time, and you don’t have that never-ending forgiveness. You don’t have the mercy all the time. When I don’t care what anyone thinks about me beyond what God thinks about me, and when I understand that, as a child of God, there is no way that He can stop loving me, that changes everything.

That changes how I act towards other people. My reputation still matters to the degree that I don’t want it to damage my testimony for Jesus Christ, but if somebody thinks I am crazy for believing God, should that bother me? It really shouldn’t. I’m not perfect in this area by any means, and I still worry too much about what people think about me. That being said, I know the truth. I don’t have to worry about what they think about me. It shouldn’t make me nervous. I don’t need to play by whatever arbitrary standard they apply to me that day.

Instead, I can play by God’s rules, and they are quite simple. If you are a child of God, He loves you and wants what is best for you. His love for you is not going to change. You may make tons of terrible decisions. But look at David. He literally committed adultery and organized the murder of Uriah. We are not going to be perfect. Yes, we are called to change as Christians and to continually strive toward Conform ourselves to the image of Jesus Christ. However, there is a great deal of freedom and knowing that I only have to worry about what God thinks about me. Anybody else’s opinion doesn’t matter all that much. In fact, I know what God thinks about me because He tells me that in His word. All of that pressure is taken off. Man, talk about freedom. Do you want to experience that but never have? You can certainly have that opportunity as well.

What I Like About the Scientific Method

The world is a certain way. In fact, the world is a certain way even if I may not understand the way the world is. I have recently been taking a class on mathematical and scientific reasoning, and it always intrigues me that we are pretty confident that we have figured out the way the world works. We thought that we understood physics perfectly because of the brilliant work of Isaac Newton, but now we have the theory of relativity that seems to challenge everything that Newton’s work was built upon. We have fundamental elements of uncertainty built into our scientific understanding. We think we know the way the world is, but because we are limited people and are simply not perfect all the time in our scientific exploration, we just sometimes get things wrong.

Part of that is the charm of any scientific endeavor. I’m not a scientist, and I don’t pretend to be one, but if I was, I think part of what I would like most about it is going to find something that no one has ever discovered before. Even though we have learned a lot about the way the world is, we don’t know everything by any means. I have heard it said somewhere that the more you learn, the more you realize that you really don’t know all that much to begin with. Once you start delving into the mysteries of something as incredibly immense and complex as the world around us, let alone the entire known creation, I’m sure it is overwhelming but also exciting to find all of the wonderful adventures you can go on as you try to pursue knowledge.

Implicit in the fact that there is always something new to learn is the disturbing fact that probably indicates we have something wrong. We have ideas about certain things, but when we discover something new that overturns our previous understanding, that means that someone was wrong in the first place. It is just something that we have to recognize. The entire premise of the scientific method is that we discover truth through experimentation. As we discover truth, the inevitable reality is that we are going to find out that some things we thought we knew about the world are simply wrong.

Notice that I very specifically said that we would have a wrong understanding about the world. The world is the way it is. There is an objective reality. This is entirely consistent with the Christian worldview, but it also makes a great deal of scientific sense. The world out there exists no matter how I understand it. If I understand it wrongly, then my views do not correspond to reality. However, if I find something that corresponds to reality, then I have discovered truth. It is an objective concept. If I discover that a hydrogen atom has one proton in its normal state, then it really does not matter how many I feel like it has, and it is not open to alternative perspectives. Obviously people can check my work to make sure I did it right and made a discovery that actually corresponds to reality, but there is no degree of self defined reality here. Rather, I am looking at the world around me and discovering parts of it. Those parts are revealed to me through my own senses as well as the powers of reasoning that I have been endowed with as a member of the human race.

I found an element that has one proton. Therefore, I might find other atoms that have one proton, and I will responsibly conclude, using the powers of logic, that I have found more of the same element. I have found more hydrogen.

The trick, of course, is that sometimes what I think is an objective fact may not be accurate. I can be wrong about things that I am pretty confident about. This really does not seem to be the case, but let’s say that I was evaluating a water molecule, and I thought I observed one oxygen atom, one hydrogen atom and one helium atom. I know this would be a problem chemically, and I know this is a far from perfect example, but let’s hypothetically say that I discovered something I thought was right but was entirely wrong. It was the best information I had at the time based on my best efforts as I was trying to explore the world around me, but it turns out that water actually is one oxygen atom and two hydrogen atoms.

The thing is that reality did not change. That’s the vital thing that we have to keep in mind here. The external world did not change. I was mistaken. I did not accurately understand the world around me, but water was still water. It is just that my understanding of water changed.

Or, let me give you an example that is a little bit more applicable to most about who are not scientists. It is almost income tax time. I am pretty sure that I am going get a refund this year. I’m pretty sure that is true because, largely, I have spent a lot of money on tuition in the past year. Over the past few years, that tax credit has been enough to give me a refund which I am pretty happy about.

Objective reality might turn out to be different when I hit the tax code. My numbers might get put in the system, and it may simply be the case that something has changed and I do not get money back this year. I hope I get money back, but my perception of what I think I will get is based on the best information I have right now. I think I will get money because I have the past few years. When matched up with the objective reality of the income tax formula, we will find out. I might understand reality accurately right now. I hope I do. I hope I get the money back that I think will be coming my way.

If I am wrong though, I will have to change my understanding of the world. The tax code does not change based on what I think it should be or what I expect it to be based on prior experience. I have to change my understanding based on the way it actually turns out to be.

I can’t help but think as I keep reading these scientific texts that are far beyond my comfort level that we have to come back to the baseline truth that science is often done under philosophical assumptions. We assume certain things. For me, you can tell I am obviously assuming that the external world is real and exists beyond my perception of it. For some people, they might deny the existence of the external world altogether or at least deny that we can make in the objective judgments about this world around us.

The thing is that science follows me at least to this point. Science has to make certain philosophical assumptions, or it is unable to function. The scientific method largely relies on the fact that the universe is, to a large degree, predictable. As I understand it, and I am a definite amateur, there is actually a little bit of debate on the quantum level that things are as regular as they appear. I mentioned that earlier, and I don’t really understand all of it, but hopefully some smart person will fill me in. In general though, the scientific method relies on the assumption that things are not random. The whole point of repeating experiments as part of the method is that if we see a consistent result enough of the time, we can draw a conclusion about an objective fact about our world. It is always possible for something to be disproven, but that is an inherent shortcoming of our limited human perspective and our misapplied logic to come to what we believe is a certain conclusion.

I am not a scientist. I don’t pretend to be one. However, I do find it fascinating, and I find it fascinating because it is an endeavor to discover things about our world. Information is a good thing, and discovery is also a good thing. The more that we learn about the world around us, the more we can be amazed by it. However, the fact that I am amazed about things beyond me is because they are out there. They are not just part of my perception or interpretation. They are parts of creation that were made alongside me and around me. That is just about as remarkable as it gets.

How Can We Communicate Better?

What is a word? At the most fundamental level, it is a collection of sounds or letters that have been put together into a string. We then take that collection of sounds or letters and assign it to a certain meaning. It may be used to describe an object, an idea, a sound, a taste or really anything else. However, that collection of sounds or letters has become not quite synonymous with, but at least indicative of something in our minds.

The problem with words is that sometimes they have multiple different meanings, and they can occasionally mean different things to different people. What if I say the word volume? What comes to mind immediately? For some of you, you might assume that I talking about one particular book in a series. For some of you, you might assume that I talking about how loud or quiet the television is. Still others might be more scientifically minded and think that I am speaking about the three-dimensional space within an object.

Context matters. If I ask you to turn down the volume, you will know which sense of the word I am going for because you know that the other two don’t make sense. If I ask you to hand me volume seven off of the shelf, you will hand me a book that probably has that number on the spine. We understand what words mean not only by their own meanings but also the meanings of the words that surround them.

Context is not always enough though. I can tell you that I am a Christian. The word Christian has so many meanings, and it is often times used in such similar contexts that it can be hard to tell very much about me from just that one word. I can tell you that I go to a Christian church. That is a true statement. The people from Westboro Baptist Church will also tell you that they attend a Christian church. I would strongly contend that they are not representing the love of Christ to the world, and I am very confident that my assessment is accurate. However, my point is that they would say they are a Christian church even if I do not believe they are.

Therefore, it can be a little hard to tell what one means with a term like Christian. To dip a little bit into politics (I’m trying to keep the politics off of this site since a friend and I recently started a political website that I think of a better home for those types of conversations), it can be a little bit hard to tell what it means to be a liberal or conservative. Liberal is actually a really interesting word because America was built on political liberalism, but it is far from synonymous with liberal in our modern parlance. I know people who would say that they believe in liberalism, taking the classical meaning, and are also conservatives in our modern sense. However, there are plenty of liberals today who would say that they believe in liberalism, and they are not conservative. They believe in liberalism in the modern sense. However, it is the same word, and it could be used in the same context. You can have modern liberals and modern conservatives saying that they believe in liberalism but meaning quite different things. You can have people say they are Christians but mean very different things.

What are we to do then? Language is a funny thing. There is a ton of potential for misunderstanding. I guess we could get really specific when we start to describe things. Instead of simply telling you that I am a Christian, I could tell you a type of statement of faith complete with my perspective on creation, the fall, the nature of the Trinity and so many other things. That would definitely be helpful, but we don’t do that every time we use a word that has a potentially ambiguous meaning. If you really want to know my perspective on things and the time and place is right, obviously that is probably the best way to go about making sure we communicate clearly and don’t fall into verbal ambiguity.

Short of that type of opportunity to go into a great amount of specific detail to actually pin down these words that are used in a variety of ways, I would like to suggest that there are few concepts that we can employ to try to make our conversation more productive. After all, that’s what we want, I think. We want to be able to say what we mean, and we want people to understand what we mean. We don’t want people to misunderstand our words because they take a different interpretation of a word than we do.

First, I think one thing we need to remember is that there is always a greater context. I suggested that you might not always have time to sit down and hear someone’s entire statement of faith. You might not know exactly what that person means when he or she espouses Christianity. Even if you don’t have time to get all of the details, make sure you understand that there is a larger context. There is more to discover. Maybe you will never get the opportunity to discover all of that, but I would suggest that it is important to remember that just because someone says that he or she is a Christian, I would probably not take him or her as the automatic representation of every Christian for all time in every place.

If you do get the opportunity to hear little bit more about that person’s faith, then you might realize that they are actually a pretty good representation of let’s say Presbyterian theology. From there, you realize that maybe you can get some idea of what a Presbyterian believes by this person’s example. Generalization is always dangerous from small sample sizes, no matter how much you know about that one case. However, if you are going to generalize, at least make sure that you are generalizing from a like thing to another like thing. If you want to generalize about Presbyterians from that one Presbyterian you know, at least make sure that the one that you know is a good representation of the beliefs of that denomination. There is always a greater context, so in those situations when you can’t learn everything, don’t generalize on the little that you know. That’s asking for conflict.

Second, we need to remember that if something doesn’t necessarily make sense, it is not automatically wrong. It might be wrong. People hold contradictory beliefs all the time. I think that is kind of like Christians to simultaneously affirm that all religions are valid pathways to God. Christians claim to believe God’s word, and Jesus explicitly says that He is the Way. It is a singular term indicating that He is the only Way. Therefore, it is contradictory to say that all religions are paths climbing up the same mountain to God, but many people believe that. Some things very well might be wrong.

That being said, not everything will be automatically wrong just because we can’t understand it. If I hear someone talk about something I don’t get, it is possible for me to have a little bit of humility and think that I may have it wrong or simply don’t have enough knowledge in some area. I’m not saying that we give everyone a free pass by any means. Errors must be corrected, but if we don’t know whether or not they are actually errors, then we shouldn’t automatically jump to that assumption. If the conversation allows for it, we can ask clarifying questions, or we may have to file it away for something to figure out later. We don’t excuse error, but I think that we are tempted sometimes to automatically dismiss something we don’t understand simply on the virtue of the fact that we don’t understand it. I just don’t think that should be our default setting.

Finally, it is pretty important when we think about language and properly understanding what people are saying that we practice charity. A lot of times there are a few different ways to interpret what someone is saying. One may be pretty bad, and the other could be not so bad. At least my temptation is to assume the worst for some reason. It is not always justifiable, but if there are two possible ways to read a situation, I feel like we often times take the worst road.

Maybe we should stop doing that. If we assume the best out of people, we are going to be disappointed sometimes without a doubt. Sometimes we will get burned when we think that people have good intentions and they really don’t. I don’t want to get burned any more than anyone else. I don’t want to experience that hurt. However, how much more hurt am I either creating or amplifying by not assuming good intentions? While we can’t always trust everyone, and while we might learn that certain people do not ever or hardly ever have good intentions, by and large, I feel like if we assume good intentions given no reasonable evidence to the contrary, then I think it will help us with these linguistic ambiguities. We interpret as charitably as we can. Again, we do not blindly accept, and we don’t affirm everything. However, in short conversation, I think charity is an important virtue.

Overall then, we have to remember that there is a greater context, even if we don’t know it. We have to accept that things that we do not understand are not automatically wrong. Then we have to approach these issues with as much charity as we can absent of prior evidence. If we do these three things, I think that we can deal with language in a much better way and relate to each other much better as a result.