What you don’t see isn’t obvious

There are numerous inventions that were seemingly obvious, and yet no one thought of them for years even after they were needed.

When we read the Scriptures, it can be like that. We easily miss significant things right before our eyes. It can be because of cultural biases, our frame of mind, failure to understand key frases, cultural context, context with other passages, and so on.

Likewise, have you ever been with an older couple who are very close having lived together in marriage for many years, and yet as you talk with them something comes up, and one of them looks at the other and says, “You never told me about that before.”

It is a great irony of life that even our vision to comprehend the Great Book given by God to us in part to help us understand our own condition is clouded.

Paradoxically,even as we peer into the Scriptures through blurry eyes, we learn through our weakness of God’s greatness and our need for Him.

Just today, I read the book of Ecclesiastes. I have long understood the phrase “under the sun” as having key importance in the book and have even preached sermons emphasizing that point.

As I read it today, I was struck with the obvious fact that the phrase “under the sun” was intended to represent life from man’s viewpoint as I understood, but more than that, it was not written from man’s point of view generically as I understood, but rather from the viewpoint of Solomon, The Preacher.

That simple observation changes the reading and understanding of the book in simple and subtle, yet profound ways.

What do you see in Ecclesiates? What else am I missing?

—Luke

My Narrative Story

Over the years, I have dealt with people who have reacted to my teaching and preaching in ways I found dissappointing. I felt they weren’t listening, were apathetic, or perhaps were ignoring what I was saying.

I used to complain that it seemed like people listened to my preaching through a filter. I did my best to make my messages simple and concise, and yet it seemed like most people took what I said and just filtered it out.

I wanted to somehow take those filters out of people’s ears.

Over the years, I made excuses, ignored the problem, dismissed people as being hard-hearted, and never came to a satisfactory understanding of what was really going on.

This all came to a head one Sunday morning when I called four young people into my office to talk to them before they were baptized. These were youngsters who had been coming to our church for quite some time. They were respectful and generally “good” kids. They professed a salvation experience several months before, but since I had broken my foot and was on crutches, several months had passed before I was able to baptize them.

This meeting was supposed to be a formality. I was supposed to ask them if they had been saved and understood baptism. They were supposed to just give a pat answer so we could go ahead with the baptism.

When I got to the part about baptism and asked them if they understood the nature of baptism, they began to explain to me in detail how the baptismal waters washed away sin.

I don’t teach that. Their Sunday School teacher doesn’t teach that. In spite of the discipleship course they had completed, not only were they giving me an answer that was totally wrong, but they thought it was the answer I was looking for.

I was floored. This experience rocked my world.

I couldn’t find a way to explain this using any of the standard excuses. They just didn’t fit. These kids weren’t hard hearted. They weren’t dumb. They weren’t apathetic. They weren’t even poor listeners. On the contrary.

I put everything I could on hold over the next few weeks. I had to figure something out.

I did a lot of introspective soul-searching, thinking, and research. And I started to find some surprising answers. Answers not only to the problem at hand, but also answers that helped me with some other seemingly unrelated things.

I came to realize the simple reality that a lot of the people I thought were rejecting my preaching weren’t even understanding my preaching.

My never ending attempts at making things more simple were, in fact, doing exactly the opposite and making things even harder for them to understand.

Thankfully, I found a major key to getting through that filter I imagined. While it is as old as Adam’s family, it is largely forgotten and misunderstood by today’s academics, teachers, and preachers for reasons I plan to discuss in later posts.

More next week, but for now, I will leave you with one of the sites that helped enlighten me as to what was going on.

Back then, the site was called, www.chronologicalbiblestorying.com. Now it has been updated. Unfortunately, perhaps due to copyright concerns, it seems to be missing the pdf orality test, the part that helped me the most. You can find the updated site at www.oralitystrategies.org.

—Luke

This is the second article in this series. You can find the first one here.

My Dancing Student

I once had a student in an afternoon class who went to school all morning, went home, probably ate a quick lunch and then was off to my class.

The unfortunate thing is that he couldn’t sit still. That is hard for a six year old boy who hasn’t played all day.

I soon found out though, that his inability to sit didn’t affect his ability to learn. On the contrary, he couldn’t learn if I made him sit still. He was too distracted thinking about trying to sit still!

And so he would stand. He would dance. He would twirl. He would fiddle with his pencil. He would do anything but sit. For the sake of the other (also very active) students, I tried to get him to at least dance in one place and not go all over the room.

And he learned. He was very smart and had a natural gift for learning English, and so he excelled. The other students also did well, but when I asked a question, he would stop moving around (or not) and spit out the answer before anyone else. And the answer was right.

Nevermind that to all outward appearances he wasn’t paying a bit of attention.

He learned the material and much more importantly, he wasn’t learning to hate learning.

I just hope someone doesn’t ruin it for him.

—Luke