Skin

There is a difference between white skin and black skin. There shouldn't be, but the statistics bear out otherwise. The color of your skin is relevant to your jail sentence, your job hunt, your mortgage, and your student loans, among other things. Rising awareness of the ways racism has been built into the way our systems work has revealed another difference in our skin, that of thick skin and thin skin.

I was scrolling through Facebook and I saw a post about five teenagers who watched a man drown and got away with it. I was perturbed but unsurprised because I'm studying for the bar so I am deep in the "no duty to rescue" doctrine, but the OP was livid that such cruelty could go unpunished in our society. What caught my eye was the sole comment below the post, "They sound like black kids . . . go figure."

My heart started pounding. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. Unsure if I should say anything (quick list of reasons why engaging is a bad idea: I didn't know the commenter, I only very loosely know the OP, and nothing good ever comes from a Facebook debate), I googled "how to respond to racist Facebook comments" and chose to engage after reading this article.

I'm always deeply conflicted about engaging on such things, and I have a quick anecdote as to why.

My neighbor flies a Confederate flag, and I often wondered what our black neighbor thought of it, driving past it every day. When a lawn jockey appeared beside it, my rage intensified and I felt helpless knowing our cousins would see the unequivocal combo. When I worked up the courage to ask one of my cousins if the display offended him, I was stunned by his response, just a shrug.

In that moment, I thought of that Cracked article that counseled that it's pretty rude to get offended for someone else, and you can't force someone to be offended. Maybe it was gracious and mature of my cousin to let my neighbor's racism roll, to not internalize it or take it as an affront of his personhood. Maybe he has thick skin.

On the other hand, My dad occasionally recounts with shame the time a police officer in pursuit of some neighborhood criminal stopped my dad to ask him if he had seen "where the n***** went" and all my dad said was no. We often have opportunities to speak against evil, but it's hard to know what to say or how to say it.

See, I have thin skin. I often see for the first time things other people have witnessed all their lives. I don't have a good barometer for what fights are worth fighting. I don't want to contribute to the widening of the culture wars by jumping down people's throats about things that don't really matter. (I don't want to be part of the hamburger problem.) Like the penguins in Madagascar say, you have to pick and choose your battles in life!

And I wonder if people who say things like, "They sound like black kids" also have thick skin. When I came back to that Facebook post an hour later it was filled with comments levied at the first commenter, calling her a c**t. Not only did I feel guilty for stirring the pot, but now I felt obligated to come to her defense. #classicFacebookdevolution Much to my surprise, she let it roll.

Maybe it's better to just have thick skin. But it must also be true that there are consequences for our harsh and evil words. Words aren't just words. For Jesus said, "But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a person." (Matthew 15:18) Careless words, careless hearts, and then a careless culture? Luke puts it a little differently than Matthew, "A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of."

Addressing sexism in the classroom

I so read "Lamb to the Slaughter" with one of my classes. It's a story about a woman who kills her husband when he tells her he's divorcing her. There's a short film by Alfred Hitchcock that opines he's divorcing her because he's having an affair. I asked my class, "Is it ever justified to kill your spouse for cheating on you?" (If you think this is a ridiculous question, consider Mosaic law. Since we have a mix of nationalities represented, I'm always interested to see the lack of consensus on certain points of morality.)

My Brazilian student (it's worth noting for these purposes that he's male) stated firmly, "For a man, yes, but for a woman, no." Stunned, I asked him, "Why?" And looking incredibly puzzled by my question he answered with brows knit, "It's my culture." Later I told him it was also a common practice in my culture also, but he challenged me pointing out that most Americans would call it a double standard. I whipped out the term cognitive dissonance, attempting to explain that just because a society says one thing doesn't mean they always act that way, and that just because a culture is a certain way doesn't mean it's right. We didn't discuss it again. 

Later that week, another student called me over to the corner where he was working with this Brazilian student. Laughing he told me how the Brazilian was a bad guy because he was looking for a new girlfriend while he was still with his current girlfriend. And the Brazilian told me how he was stressed out because his girlfriend didn't trust him and he wasn't sure he could take it anymore. (I met this girl briefly in the subway station late at night. I passed my student on the stairs, cheerily waved and shot him a "Hi!" He shouted in response, "Teacher! I love you!" and his girlfriend snapped, "What? Who is she?!" They were drunk, but you can imagine the dynamic here.) I told him I hoped that wasn't true, because he was a nice guy. But he shook his head. "Maybe I am a bad guy," he said. 

For the record, this is a hill I have decided not to die on. By virtue of actual and pronounced physiological differences, there may be some legitimate justifications for treating men and women differently in certain ways or in certain contexts. And it can be a tall order sorting out what's a legitimate and justified difference in treatment and what isn't. I am prepared to bear the hardship of what I consider to be mistreatment because of my gender. It's a naive statement for me to make, but there it is. Women's rights are necessarily important to me, but they're not as high on my priority list as other things. 

But these encounters have me wondering what the correct and appropriate way to handle these statements is. On the one hand, I don't want to judge my students. I don't want them to feel like something they perceive is cultural is something I perceive as immoral. And for those who wonder, who cares if it's against their culture if they're wrong?, I would point out that they don't think they're wrong and that saying "you're wrong" doesn't productively advance the discussion. 

My word is gold on questions of grammar. If I say a verb is transitive, it is. But on social issues I am an expert only on my own perspective of my own culture. I have no credibility to tell them what is wrong with their culture, even if there is indeed something wrong with their culture. And perhaps my reasoning here is obvious (of course a collaborative and judgment-free zone should be preserved within the classroom) (and that has to be the way it rolls when a large number of students are Saudi and come from a culture that affords men four wives and bars women from driving), but I recognize this idea is difficult for some people when pitted against the other value at play here: the truth.

Because on the other hand I don't think sexism is wrong because my culture tells me so (even though my culture does tell me so.) Sexism is wrong because the highest authority acknowledged by history, by the world (God) says so. It is not okay to be looking for a new person to date while you're exclusive with someone else. It is not okay for women to be punished for adultery when men are not. And while we're at it, it is not okay for one guy to have four wives. It's just not. To my students that may seem like an opinion, but that's truth I am convicted of, knowing my own worth as a human, knowing the principles of righteousness my God has revealed, knowing what is a social good in a western and humanistic society. And if I care about the truth, I should speak it, right?

I love how as a teacher I am uniquely poised to introduce my students to compelling ideas and facilitate an increase of empathy, perspective-sharing, and diversity, all of which I think are inherently valuable things. But those things are not more important than what is right. There seems to be a very delicate line to walk when speaking the truth in love. And I wonder if it's possible to draw a line in the sand regarding right and wrong without leaving some students on the wrong side of the line unequipped with a path of egress. I sense there is a way to have it both ways, but in my allegiance to both values I'm hard-pressed to imagine what that would look like.

Have you ever been in a situation like this? Is it possible to speak truth while maintaining a judgment-free zone in the classroom? How would you leverage this kind of conversion?

My Cautionary Tale

My most embarrassing moment was the happened during the summer I was 14, my first week (and coincidentally only?) week at camp. We were playing four on a couch with one of the boys' cabins, and there was some kid in that cabin I had a crush on, a brother of one of my cabinmates. And I don’t remember what I did exactly, but I remember that I was acting really goofy and laughing uncontrollably, which didn’t strike me as like terrible or anything, until a friend told me I was acting like a fool. 

And I was mortified, of course. Not so much because of the random boy I had drawn into my spectacle, but because of what my friend said. I cared intensely of what my friend thought. She called me out on acting like a fool, and I was embarrassed like Meg from Little Women was when Laurie caught her putting on airs at a party. I cared very much that she thought I was making a fool of myself, and I cared about what my cabin thought, what the other girls thought. I had made myself that girl. Not in a 50s television kind of way. In a Mean Girls kind of way. You know. Kind of still makes me cringe.

I am reflecting on this because I did something similar today. And it was humiliating not just because of the amused bewilderment on the guy’s face, but because I did it in front of a room full of my coworkers, one of whom point-blank asked me why I was acting like a fool, and in that moment I was so thankful I didn’t blush and I hoped no one could see the sweat on my forehead as I tried to save face and laugh it off.

Why do I never learn?!

True confessions, though I don’t see myself as a flirty person, I also live in fear that I don’t really know myself. I don’t want to be that way. I want to see myself accurately. I want to understand who I really am and accept my fallenness and my neediness. But I second-guess that always. I am so confused by the things I think and feel. I don’t understand the things that happen in my own mind, and this is so frustrating because it leads to a lot of cognitive dissonance. Cos there are things my instincts want that my mind doesn’t.

But one thing I know to be true is that I’m an attention whore. I chalk it up to a mixture of factors, like being a first born and also, being human, but it takes a lot of work for me to call it what it is. For example, I kind of hate that I enjoy teaching so much, because part of the reason I enjoy it is I like commanding a classroom, and I like everyone asking me questions and following my instructions and laughing at my jokes and listening to my stories. That’s an ugly thing to admit, and I hate it because it’s often true. I can say that teaching is rewarding and missional and it totally is, but sometimes I don’t love it for that reason, sometimes I love it for bad reasons.

So you can imagine how this colors my interactions with people. I really believe that people are the most important thing, and I want to affirm people and serve people and see people because I believe that’s what I’m called to do, but honestly, sometimes I turn towards people not because I want to build them up but because I want to build myself up.

And that’s what makes flirting selfish, isn’t it? I don’t even remember the same of the kid I flirted with at camp. And my coworker, I can’t say I’ve ever had a serious conversation with him. We riff non-stop. This, actually, was part of my flirty faux pas. I think I said, “We have got to get better at having normal conversations.” It wasn't embarrassing because my actions potentially betrayed some veiled affection, no, it was embarrassing because I was caught trying to draw attention to myself.

I don’t want to communicate to my coworkers that I don’t care about them. I don’t want to be the person who is (unprofessionally) flirting with people just to make herself feel good. I want my coworkers to feel valued and respected. I want my coworkers to feel individual heard and noticed by me. I don’t want to have conversations based only on teasing and quick wit. And while I love love LOVE laughing with my coworkers, there seems to be an appreciable difference between laughing together and flirting. 

Flirting is not the greatest social ill or anything, but it’s not something I want to do. Not subconsciously and definitely not on purpose. And to be clear I’m horrendous at flirting, which is one reason why getting caught doing it is so embarrassing. I’m like the opposite of smooth, probably because I don’t flirt to be smooth, I unwittingly flirt because I wittingly want attention. But I think flirting is fundamentally using someone else to make yourself feel like you’re awesome, and, that’s not something I want to be associated with. And I don’t want to be that girl. You know the one. 

Though the shame was still hot when I relived the exchange two hours later, the embarrassment has already faded substantially by now. I wonder if I will remember this as an embarrassing moment once time passes. Hm. I make this mistake a lot. I can remember so many different versions of this situation, from high school, university, oh! Ugh, even from last summer. I wish I hadn’t stopped to think about it; this isn’t a fun game. But it’s a necessary one, right? Identify the mistake, repent of the mistake, move on, rest in grace. 

Jesus is shaping this attention whore into a validation giver. Jesus is making me less self-focused and more others-focused. I gotta believe that, even though these mistakes make me wonder. And His beautiful grace means that my testimony to my coworkers isn’t forever broken, and even if I’m that girl for the rest of my time on earth He can still make good things happen. Sanctification I’m sometimes still skeptical about, but on grace I am certain: my mistakes do not prevail over the power of His will. Thank the Lord.

Flu Season

There was this one time my sister got proposed to on the train. That's a great story.

I'll give you the Cliff Notes. We were in Kazakhstan, traveling from our city to the capital, and we took the afternoon train, which is always pretty crowded. We ended up sitting with a former student of one of our friends who heard us speaking English. So he had three hours to figure out my sister is as sweet as she is adorable! But it only took him one hour. The remaining two hours I spent trying to alleviate some of her discomfort and make awkward conversation.

So naturally the topic I chose was death. The poor guy was baffled by my reasoning. He thought I was crazy to prefer a place I'd never been to (that might not even be real or might not let me in!) life on earth. For him it was a morbid way to live, embracing mortality and not living in active avoidance of the things that could do you in.

But the way I see it, when I'm lying there waiting to die, I'm not going to be thinking, "If only I hadn't sat on that concrete, if only I'd worn warmer clothes." Or, to contextualize the example for the western perspective, I'm not going to blame my demise on all the times I microwaved my meals in plastic or ate GMOs or got a vaccine with who knows what kind of preservatives. I won't be regretting the foods I should have avoided or the treatments I shouldn't have gotten. I'll be regretting watching TV instead of investing in people. I'll be regretting the times I closed in when I should have reached out.

You can try and duck the things that are bad for you: smoking, red meat, carcinogens and free radicals. You can eat clean and go homeopathic, and yeah, you might even be healthier for it. But death is still going to come.

I'm not saying it's silly to care about the industrialization of food or the ingredients in our medications, cos it's not. I'm glad people care about that. And I'm not saying you shouldn't care about your health and your safety, because you should. Honor Him with your body.

What I am saying is that we try to stay healthy not to health's own end, but to be of service. You can't visit shut-ins if you're home with a fever. You can't mow your neighbor's lawn if you're heaving over the toilet. Our priority is people. And if we live to serve people in Jesus's name, does it matter what kills us?

For me, admittedly speaking with the naiveté of a relatively healthy youth, I don't care what's going to kill me. Risk a little.

All this to say, it's time to get your flu vaccine, folks.

I made a mistake today.

I was at a specialty grocery store, hunting for some peanut butter, when a bottle of coffee-flavoring syrup caught my eye. As I examined the bottle, a fellow shopper smiled at me, speaking quickly in Russian and gesturing towards the shelf. 

"Что?" I asked.

He repeated himself.

"извините," I apologized, "я не могу говорить по-русски." I had already said this several times over the course of the day. I waited for him to shoot me a comprehending smile, nod, and then walk away, as had happened several times over the course of the day.

But then, with no hint of an accent he ask, "You speak English, then?"

I was dumbfounded. "Yes! Of course! What were you saying?"

He reiterated, in English, that he was wondering if the syrup was any good, and asked me where I was from. When I told him the States he said, "Ah, you're a mssnary?"

"Um, I'm a teacher," I clarified, simultaneously vamping and wondering who the heck this guy was. And he asked me a few more questions about peanut butter, learning Russian, and then hit me with an invitation to have coffee or drinks. "Well, I can't right now," I told him, grappling for an excuse, "But that's very kind of you." And THIS is about where I made my mistake. The second I realized he was not just a friendly local chatting with the weird foreigner I should have been clear that . . . well, actually, that what? I wasn't interested in getting to know him? Kinda harsh. That I don't date strangers I meet in the supermarket in foreign countries? I mean, I never consciously made that rule, but it seems reasonable rule to have. 

But this isn't my home culture, and, I'm always so desperate to affirm and avoid letting down complete strangers, and, I screwed up. He told me we could meet whenever would be comfortable for me, and I said okay, and then I took his phone number, and then he called his phone from mine. In what seemed like the very blink of an instant I was past the point of no return. 

"When do you leave?" he asked, just before walking away.

"In June," I told him, feeling relieved, as this answer had worked the last time someone tried to pick me up in the supermarket.

Instead he smiled, "It's plenty of time." 

After all this transpired, I wanted to 1) hide (which I did, over by the soy sauce, where he saw me again and showed me the pastry he had bought for our meeting, which I declined, but he handily shrugged off) and 2) slam my head into something thick and hard. I could scarcely believe 1) that this had even happened, and 2) that I had gone along with and participated in the whole exchange. I think I even smiled.

This experience is just one of many that prove to me that my feelings guide my actions, not my thoughts. If I had been rational about this whole thing when he asked about having coffee I would have said, "Thanks but no thanks." But for whatever reason I didn't feel like I had the power to turn him down. Communicating my discomfort felt impolite. I didn't want to let him down, I wanted to affirm him, so I went along with something that made me uncomfortable to the point that I wrote a check I didn't intend to cash. I never crossed my mind at any point until it was too late to just say, "Sorry, no."

I'm reminded of that time Sarah nearly got engaged on the train to Astana. She spent three and a half hours feeling acutely uncomfortable while I tried to buffer this guy's advances. It was not the most fun train ride for her, but we couldn't ask him to leave or stop, so she bore the discomfort in silence. (Hopefully in retrospect it's loads funnier, though!) Talking about it with Stuart afterward I was struck by his perspective on the whole thing: if you feel uncomfortable, say so. So the guy wanted to come to dinner with us, no big deal; all we had to do was say no. 

It's like, that honestly never occurred to me. 

Lightbulb: You're allowed to shoot people down. You're allowed to reject people. You're allowed to not be interested. Or, I mean, those are all rather harsh ways of thinking about it, but what I mean is, if you don't want to have coffee or drinks with the random guy you meet in the supermarket, you're allowed to say so. Saying "Sure!" when you don't mean it is far worse than a sincere "No thanks." And this is the big mistake I made.

The guy called this evening. I had told Bet my tale of woe so that if he called when she had the phone (we share) she would know not to tell him I'd call him right back. And I told Teka because it was kind of a funny story. But, oh, then he called, and David said I needed to answer and be straight with him and tell him I'm not interested.

(I mean, "not interested" are not the words I would use. "Creeped out" are the words I would use. "Morally opposed" are the words I would use. But I can see how that might but considered an uncharitable way of putting it.)

Instead I just let it ring and ring and ring. If he calls again I'll probably have to answer and tell him I won't be meeting him for coffee (I mean, I fleetingly considered it, banking on the likelihood that after one conversation he'd quickly become disinterested, because I would rather go through with an uncomfortable situation than break the news that I'm not interested) because, I don't know, it's the right thing to do, and the consequence of my mistake. 

So if you're wondering what I'm doing overseas, contributing to stereotypes about how American women are flirts but flakey is just one of many things I have my hand in. Gotta let my mistakes all hang out so that at least others can learn from them. 

Use Twitter for good, not for burns

I got in a Twitter war with one of the students in youth group today. Sunday's usually a pretty Twitter-filled day for me, because I like to tweet things that resonate with me from the sermon or the lesson. This is usually not to distracting to anyone (although there was that super awkward time where I finished sending a tweet, only to look up and see the pastor staring at me) but because of my habit of sitting in the front, my phone-fiddling is usually pretty visible to the room. I don't try to hide that I'm on my phone. I forget that other people don't know I'm tweeting about the lesson.

So this student saw me on my phone during the lesson, tweeting about the year of jubilee and God's thoughts on wealth inequality. He called me out on it over Twitter and like a total n00b I took the bait, and we went back and forth for a bit, until he released this zinger: "Yes, you'll teach the whopping 2 people that look up to you that tweeting is more important than God's word. #CalledOut"

Aaaah, hashtag burn! 

It burned, it really did! What I had thought was our typical banter seemed to have evolved to a legitimate rebuke . . . even if it was over social media. But still, hashtag harsh! We were dismissed to small group and I turned to the junior high girls ready to complain, "Waaah, this punk hurt my feelings!" And they were like, "Can we please talk about the lesson instead?" And the conviction burned even more! 

Still, I found him after youth group and laid out my case. 1) I was tweeting something relevant. 2) This student was tweeting me during the lesson; hypocrisy! I was big-time on the defense, talking fast to save my face and spluttering at his audacity. And while he was laughing at me and maintaining his position, it began to dawn on me . . . I was being ridiculous.

Okay, whatever, I don't feel convicted that using my phone in Sunday school is wrong. I feel like I have freedom in the Spirit to tweet away. Fine. But sometimes I forget that not everyone in youth group is like me. Sometimes I forget that there are kids in that room who hold their faith quite loosely, who use their phones to converse with their friends and feed their distraction from the word being served. Sometimes I forget that the example I give is not based on my intentions but rather my actions. Tweeting in church is #NBD to me, but I need to take the message my actions are sending far more seriously. 

The student was totally right. 

Even now, hours later in the safety of my home, I feel squishy with shame over how poorly I received his rebuke. How defensive I was, how indignant I was. How my concern over something someone tweeted at me communicated to the junior high girls in my small group the exact opposite of graciousness and humility and self-control. Instead of letting it roll I got all worked up. Over a little tweet. Oh, que vous sotte. It's a wonder they even let me be a youth leader. But you can be sure, no one's going to catch me touching my phone in youth group ever again. Baby steps.

Thanks, Robert.

Because I felt like living large on a Friday night, I stopped at Trader Joe's on my way home. (I know, how is my life so exciting?!) Having drooled over the circular they'd sent in the mail last week, I knew exactly what I wanted. Some supplies for Mother's Day french toast, as well as potstickers, dried mango strips, and a PB&J chocolate bar. Starting the weekend right. Woo!

But as I clutched my heavy cream and brioche rolls, examining packages of organic strawberries, a voice cut into my consciousness. "Excuse me, I just wanted to tell you, those are some awesome shoes." I looked up from my strawberry-perusing, and standing beside me was a neatly dressed twenty-something smiling at me good-naturedly. "All you're missing is a leather jacket to go with them." I thanked him and told him I'd left the jacket in the car. 

He starts asking me all these questions, just making conversation, like where was I from and what did I do? I told him about chicken zoning in Scituate, and Trader Joe's New England presence, and doing play therapy part-time, and where I got my sandals, and before I knew it our quick exchange morphed into a legitimate conversation. I mentioned I was going abroad to teach English and his countenance seemed to shift a bit. "Oh, when are you leaving?" he asked. I told him July and he smiled. "Too bad, I was going to ask you out to coffee." 

At this point I became acutely aware of all the shoppers around me, and the fact that I had been monopolizing the strawberry display. Wait, what? Is this real life?! In my head there was no presence of awkwardness, I just played it off all cool, "Aw, that's flattering, thank you. Good to meet you." But did it actually go down sans-awkwardness? Who knows. We shook hands and exchanged names, and he wished me good luck on my travels, and I said . . . "You too!"

Two things struck me about this encounter. For one, I felt very young. I tried to hint perhaps I was too young, by alluding to living in my parents' home and being an undergrad, as in, "Don't you feel creepy for hitting on someone so much younger than you?" And then it occurred to me, I'm almost twenty-two. That's actually not that young. And he couldn't've been more than 27. That's actually not that old. All at once I felt ushered in to part of the twenty-something fold.

For another, is this a thing, chatting up strangers in the supermarket? Is this socially acceptable? You know nothing about me except that I'm wearing steampunk sandals and shopping at Trader Joe's, but you feel this is enough of a basis to see what comes from a conversation? As in, "You endorse the values and novelty of this business model, so we at least already have that in common." Sure, I've begun to gather that it's harder to meet new people once out of college, but it never occurred to me that the supermarket might be a place to look. 

The upside of talking to strangers? Sometimes they give you an ego boost. Free of charge.