I like you

…but I’m not going to date you right now.”  Why guys prematurely declare their love and then don’t make a move.  Or, why guys ask the girl out but then end it fast.  Secrets revealed:

• I am not ready.  I have other things I want to focus on before I commit.
• You have a boyfriend.
• Um, you have a boyfriend….
• I’m also interested in another girl who I may be more attracted to….
• I’m too immature.
• I just had to say it but didn’t think it through.
• I don’t think I’m good enough for you.
• There are some things I don’t like about you (e.g. smoking).
• I’m drunk.
• I’m still not over my ex.
• I can’t see myself being with you for the rest of my life.

“Jerk.”

Tom Lin

http://www.tomandnancylin.com/bio/

Risk-Taking: Holy Investment Challenge
Luke 19:12-27
targeted to college and career

Doing risky business with

1. Our opportunity to be students
             Those who go off to college often find themselves in a different life stage than the rest of us who are workin, building marriages, and raising children.  They have the opportunities to build close friendships (how many say their life friends were made in college), study academics with vast resources around them, to talk late into the night.  Examples of those who have taken advantage of this include a trash outreach in one of the biggest dorms in the nation.  “We are Christians who just wanted to serve in a small way.  Would you like us to take out your trash?”  Some wanted to pay them, others gave them even more trash, but by the end of the night four joined them to see what they were about.
2. Our money and possessions
             John Ortberg wrote a book titled When the Game Is Over It All Goes Back in the Box.  What do you win that you get to keep?  We need to invest what we have before it all goes back into the box, before we leave this earth, before the Master returns.  A college friend of the speaker’s barely had enough to pay rent.  But whenever JP would come upon some cash he would immediately celebrate by spending it with a friend.  He’d want to play tennis with the speaker so JP would use the money to buy a racquet.  He bought a television set for his roommate.  He’d give (not sell back) his books to incoming students.  And sure enough, there would always be enough by the end of the month.  A couple in their thirties wrote the speaker a $10,000 check because they believed God’s work through his ministry and wanted to invest in that.  A group in Harvard donated $20 each and then used that combined amount to serve their classmates on campus with free coffee during finals week.  The speaker himself, at his initial job, would hold a raffle at his desk to give away free stuff.  Coworkers would congregate around his desk and eventually they built personal bonds.
3. Our social networks
            Instead of sticking to the same subjects (e.g. weather, daily routine, television shows), we need to risk conversations.  The speaker said that one time the Spirit prompted him to ask his nonbelieving roommate about God.  “Anybody but him!  He’s my roommate!  I have to live with him!”  But eventually he finally asked, “What do you think about Jesus?”  “I’m glad you asked.  I was just thinking about the time I had this near-death experience in a car crash.  I told God if he saved me I would start seeking him.  I went to church for a little while but eventually stopped….”
4. Time
             We start out all the same, as the parable demonstrates.  Instead of imitating the attitude of the third servant, who knew the minas weren’t going to be his soon anyway and thus did not pay much attention to it, we need the attitude of Schlinder in Schlinder’s List.  At the end he still realized that he had not done all that he could have (e.g. his pin and car).  “Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire.”  Being trustworthy in a small matter, the first servant was given more.  The command is to invest (not to make as much as possible). 

What prevents us from risk taking?

• Fear (of the Master, of what others think, of failure, of a language barrier..).  ”Do not fear” is mentioned 366 times in the Bible, perhaps due to our cowardliness in investing what God’s given us?
• Asian adverseness for risk.  We recall what our parents tell us essentially: “We took those risks so you won’t have to.”  We’re encouraged to keep a low profile so as to not make waves. 

Pastor Dick asked what we thought of this idea:  He would give everyone in the congregation $5 (financial risk for the leaders) and ask us to give it to the kingdom in some way (social risk for us congregants).  Maybe we want to take someone out, maybe we could pool the money and do something bigger.

Middle of Nowhere: Mongolia 2002 - 2006
I Kings 19:1-19
targeted to the English congregation

Elijah’s Gobi Desert experience:

• Beersheba is a desert
• he left his servant behind
• he made an additional day’s journey deeper into the desert
• broom tree is only about ten feet high
• suicidal

Speaker’s desert experience

• sixth and eighteenth months were the hardest
• strained marriaged
• declared he’d buy plane tickets back to the States
• issues unresolved from the States were brought up in Mongolia

Our own dry isolation experience

• Quarterlife transition.  We moved away to attend college and miss the familiar community we had at home.  We’ve moved back and find everything different.
• Family transition.  We recently became engaged, married, had children….
• Tragedy.  A loved one is severely ill or has died.  No one understands.  We’ve experienced loss and disappointment.  “Where are You, God?”
• ‘Dry’ spiritual life.  The spiritual connection with God is not felt.

Four stages of desert life:

1. Stripping process.  Elijah, by leaving his servant behind, he was declaring that he quit his job of being a prophet for God.  There appeared to be external successes but he still felt like a failure inside.  There was the incredible demonstration by God on the altar and yet Jezebel is still unrepentant and wants him dead.  Victory after victory and yet there is still failure. 
2. Wrestling with God (v. 10).  We complain to God.  “I’ve done all this for You, and there’s nothing still.  It’s unfair!”  The critical decision comes down to this:  Do you give up on God, or go deeper with God?  Coming to this point is a given, but it is especially keenly felt among leaders.  The only question is WHEN (not if) this point will come.  Horeb, the mountain of God, is actually only a seven-days journey from Beersheba, yet it took Elijah the “long time” of forty days, probably because he was wandering and wrestling with God.  Note that though Elijah gave up, God did not give up on Elijah.  God helped Elijah continue to wrestle.
3. Intimacy with God.  “Angel” in the text means a messenger from God.  This can be a human being who is doing God’s work, or simply feeling the presence of God.  In other words, God doesn’t always come “supernaturally.”  Intimacy is God meeting us at a time of great need.  Sometimes you wonder if it was right that you moved, that you were supposed to be here.  The place where you are now is not a mistake but the very place where God has brought you to meet Him.  Elijah didn’t run away to Horeb; God brought Elijah to Horeb.  And then God asks, “What are you doing here?” (v. 9).  Why did God bring you here?
4. Transformation and release. 
   1. From self-seeking confidence to dependence on God and others.  In verse 14, Elijah speaks as if he is the only hope for God’s redemption of Israel.  For the speaker, he was doing pretty well in the States.  But in Mongolia, the children made fun of his since he couldn’t speak Mongolian.  It was quite clear that God would be doing the brunt of the work there.
   2. From being a lone ranger to a community participant.  We think we’re all alone, very unique, but we’re not. 
   3. From an old identity to a new identity.  Other Biblical examples include Moses and even Jesus.  Moses was a prince but had to go into the desert before returning as God’s prophet.  Jesus went into the desert for forty days and forty nights.
   4. Only then did God told Elijah what to do next.

Practical suggestions for going through the desert:

• Be honest.  This is so hard!  Especially for us, with our emotions.  We need to admit that we have an issue with God.  We need to bring our burning questions to God.
• Determine ahead of time to go deep with God.  Our temptation is to seek a thing, an action, another person to fill the loneliness and void.  That’s what the Israelites did by making the golden calf.
• Rest with the other 7,000 (v. 18).  If you don’t know who else is in a similar situation as you, maybe your pastor would know and bring you two together.  If you can’t discern God’s voice, ask another fellow believer to help you hear God’s Word and see why you are going through this desert.  Don’t wait; initiate.

LWB: Ch11: The Truth

In the midst of writing this book, there have been times when I have found myself believing and acting on some of the very lies I was addressing:  “I don’t have time to do everything!” “I can afford to shortcut my time with the Lord this morning” “I’m acting this way because I’m so tired” “I can’t take any more!”  But the longer I walk with God, the more I am in awe of the power of the Truth!  We have already looked at many lies and the corresponding Truth.  In this final chapter, i want to highlight 22 that I believe are particularly crucial.  Rather than skimming, take time to savor these.  You may want to memorize this list, along with the key Scriptures that correspond to each Truth.  Anytime you realize you are believing lies, go back and review this list.

1.  God is good (Psalms 119:68, 136:1).  Regardless of waht we feel, regardless of what we think, God is good, and everythign He does is good.

2.  God loves me and wants me to have His best (Romans 8:32, 38-39).  There is absolutely nothing we can do to earn or deserve His love.  We cannot comprehend such unconditional love; but if we believe it and receive it, His love will transform our lives. 

3.  I am complete and accepted in Christ (Ephesians 1:4-6).  We don’t have to perform to be made acceptable to Him.  Yet we–fallen, condemned, unworthy sinners–can stand before God clean and unashamed, acceptable in His sight.  How?  Because Jesus–the pure, sinless Son of god–is acceptable to Him, and we stand in Him.

4.  God is enough (Psalm 23:1).

5.  God can be trusted (Isaiah 28:16, Hebrews 13:5).  “God has never once let me down–and He’s not goign to start now!”  I am free from the need to figure out this world and my place in it. 

6.  God doesn’t make any mistakes (Isaiah 46:10).  God is always fulfilling His eternal purposes, and they cannot be thwarted by any human failure.  If we are in Christ, our lives are in His hand, and nothing can touch our lives that has not first been “filtered through His fingers of love.”  Even when Job was suffering, God was still in control.  Satan had to get permission from God to touch His servant.  “God’s will is exactly what we would choose, if we knew what God knows.  When we stand in eternity looking back on this earthly existence, we will know by sight what we can only see now by faith: He has done all things well.

7.  God’s grace is sufficient for me (2 Corinthians 12:9). 

8.  The blood of Christ is sufficient to cover all my sin (1 John 1:7).  The psalmist understood both the enormity of his sin and the even greater enormity of God’s mercy toward repentant sinners (Psalm 130:3-4).

9.  The Cross of Christ is sufficient to conquer my sinful flesh (Romans 6:6-7).  When I sin, it is not because I couldn’t help myself; it is because I chose to yield to my old master.  I don’t have to sin (Romans 6:14).

10.  My past does not have to plague me (1 Corinthians 6:9-11).  Paul reminds a group of believers that sin does separate from God; then he assures them that through Christ, the worst of sinners can be made clean and new.  Our past does not have to be hindrances.  By God’s grace, they can actually be stepping-stones to greater victory.

11.  God’s Word is sufficient to lead me, teach me, and heal me (Psalms 19:7, 107:20, 119:105).

12.  Through the power of His Holy Spirit, God will enable me to do anything He commands me to do (1 Thessalonians 5:24, Philippians 2:13).  There is no one we cannot forgive (Mark 11:25), there is no one we cannot love (Matthew 5:44), we can give thanks in all things (1 Thessalonians 5:18), and we can be content in every circumstance (Hebrews 13:5).  The issue is not that we can’t obey God; the real issue is that we won’t forgive, we are unwilling to love, and we refuse to give thanks.  Obedience is a choice made in dependence on God.

13.  I am responsible before God for my behavior, responses, and choices (Ezekiel 18:19-22).  I am not responsible for the actions of others, but I am responsible for how I respond.

14.  I will reap whatever I sow (Galatians 6:7-8). 

15.  The pathway to true joy is to relinguish control (Matthew 16:25, Luke 1:38, 1 Peter 5:7).  We have a drive to control.  Why is it so hard to let God be God?

16.  The greatest freedom I can experience is found through submission to God-ordained authority (Ephesians 5:21).  When we do so, we are granted God’s protective covering, we release Him to workin the lives of those in authority over us, we reveal to the world the beauty of God’s created order, and we proclaim His right to rule over the universe.

17.  In the will of God, there is no higher, holier calling than to be a wife and mother (Titus 2:4-5).  True fulfillment are found through discovering why God made us and then embracing that created purpose and design.  God designed the woman to be a helper to her husband and a bearer and nurturer of life.  Marriage and motherhood are God’s norm for most women.  God’s calling for the married woman centers on her roles in the home (Titus 2:4-5).  A job outside the home may offer greater affirmation and produce more visible and immediate results.  But to make a home, to be united with a man in glorifying Godon this earth, to nurture and tend the lives of children and grandchildren, to train and mold the next generation–there is no higher calling and no greater joy.

18.  Personal holiness is more important than temporal happiness (Ephesians 5:26-27).  Happiness here and now is not the highest good, nor is it a right (Titus 2:14).

19.  God is more concerned about changing me and glorifying Himself than about solving my problems (Romans 8:29).  If we do not recognize and embrace God’s purposes and process in our lives, we will become obsessed with finding a way out of our problems.  We will become despondent and angry when God does not “cooperate” with our agenda.  Everything that matters to us must be subordinate to what matters most to Him.  What matters most to Him is that every created being reflect His glory.

20.  It is impossible to be godly without suffering (1 Peter 5:10).  It is an essential tool in the hand of God to conform us to the image of Jesus.  In the process of making wine in Jeremiah’s day, the juice from the grapes was poured into a wineskin and left to sit for weeks, until the bitter dregs or sediment settled onto the bottom.  Then it was poured into another wineskin so more dregs could be separated, repeatedly, until the wine was pure and sweet.  The nation of Moab had a history of ease and comfort; she had not been through the purifying process of being “poured” from suffering to suffering.  As a result, the thick, bitter dregs of her sin remained in her–she was “unchanged” (Jeremiah 48:11).  Suffering is God’s means of pouring us from one jar to another–of unsettling us–so the dregs of self and sin can be separated out, until the pure, sweet wine of His Spirit is all that remains. 

21.  My suffering will not last forever (2 Corinthians 4:17-18).  All suffering is purposeful and intentional.  God has a specific objective in mind for our suffering.  God has promised tha tone day “there will be no more death” (Revelation 21:4).  So, dear child of God, when your eyes are filled with tears and there seems to be no hope, take courage.  Your faith will be rewarded with the sight of the One who has promised to be with you to the end.

22.  It’s not about me; it’s all about Him (Colossians 1:16-18, Revelation 4:11)!  Once we agree with God that we exist for His pleasure and His glory, we can accept whatever comes into our lives as part of His sovereign will and purpose.

LWB: Ch10: Countering Lies With the Truth

Let’s review the two major points of this book:

• Believing lies places us in bondage.
• The Truth has the power to set us free.

We have seen that the progression toward bondage begins when we listen to Satan’s lie.  God promises a special blessing to those who do not “walk in the counsel of the wicked” (Psalm 1:1).  The progression continues as we dwell on those lies, begin to believe them, inevitably act on them, and then establish patterns in our lives that ultimately lead to bondage.  The pathway to freedom involves at least three steps:

1. Identify the area(s) of bondage or sinful behavior.
2. Identify the lie(s) at the root of that bondage or behavior.
3. Replace th lie(s) with the Truth.

The Truth has the power to overcome every lie.  The Truth has the power to set us free (John 8:32) and to protect our minds and hearts from deceptive thoughts and feelings (Psalm 91:4).  The Truth has the power to sanctify us (John 15:3, 17:17). 

Choosing the pathway of Truth calms my turbulent emotions and restores settledness and sanity to my confused thoughts.  I speak the Truth to myself–sometimes aloud, and, if necessary, over and over again–until the Truth (Matthew 5:5-9, 39, 44, 6:14-15) displaces and replaces the lies I have been believing (e.g.  she made me angry, I have a right to be angry, I have a right to defend myself, I can’t help the way I feel).  I knew I could not wait until I felt like forgiving–that I had to choose to obey God, and that my emotions would follow sooner or later.  The emotional release did not come immediately.  For some time, I found myself still feeling “bruised”; at times, I was tempted to resume my emotional temper tantrum or to subtly retaliate.  But, by God’s grace, I continued to speak the Truth to my heart and to make the choice to act on the Truth.  Out of obedience to God’s Word, I began to look for ways to rebuild the relationship and invest in the life of the one who had hurt me.  I am grateful that He loved me enough to orchestrate circumstances to bring those issues that I had not realized needd to be addressed to the surface, and I thank Him for using that experience to make me more like Jesus.

The transforming power of knowing, believing, and acting on the Truth is a Person–the Lord Jesus Christ (John 14:6, 8:31-36).  True freedom is found in a vital, growing relationship with Jesus (the living Word of God), who has revealed Himself in the Scripture (the written Word of God).  There is no substitute and there are no shortcuts.  We must also surrender to the Truth (Psalm 119:29-30).  Once we are walking according to the Truth, God wants to make us instruments to draw others to the Truth (Ephesians 4:14-15, 25).  The vision that gave birth to this book was the longing to see women set free through the Truth (James 5:19-20). The idea of “turning sinners from the error of their way” is largely foreign in our day.  The hue and cry of our postmodern culture is “tolerance.”  Many believers have become hesitant to stand for the Truth, for fear of being labeled as narrow-minded or judgmental.  Many Christians manifest this “live and let live” attitude, not only toward the world, but also in relation to other believers who are not walking in the Truth.  We must remember that in Christ and in His Word, we have Good News!  If we truly care about them, we will prayerfully and actively seek to restore them.  We must learn, believe, surrender, and live out the Truth with boldness, conviction, and compassion.

Circum

The following are some things we discussed over Chapter 9 on Circumstances:

• Comparing our spiritual lives with our biological lives is a good way to glean wisdom.  Just as you look back and see your teenage years within the context of your adult years and see the difficulties and growth, so you can do so with your spiritual sticking points.
• In your prayer requests, do you see God as sufficient?
• Do you pray to God to get out of a suffering situation?  Or do you pray through the suffering?
• When you ask for joy, patience, faith, etc., how do you expect Him to answer?  Will He give it to you on a silver platter, or will He give you the opportunity to practice (and thus hopefully improve) in that?
• Your greatest suffering will either become your greatest barrier or your greatest mnistry.
• Remember, the world will make fun of the choices that you make for God (I Peter 4).
• Do you think of suffering as punishment or preparation and growth?  Does that change the response to the suffering?  Since either way, whether you are suffering from the consequences of your sin or others’ sins or what, you are being molded and refined.
• There are many examples of those on their deathbeds using their last breaths for another, in prayer, in encouraging, in praising God.  This may be their greatest witness.  Perhaps the trials perfected them into “this finished product” as they breathed their last.
• Remember, Paul was content whether he had or had not (Philippians 4:11).
• If God is not disciplining us, we are not His child (Hebrews 12:10). 

LWB: Ch09: About Circumstances

You may have read Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day by Judith Viorst.  It seemed that everything was going wrong for poor Alexander.  Who can blame the frustrated boy for sighing at the end of the day, “I think I’ll move to Australia!”  In fact, that is exactly what the psalmist prayed on at least one occasion (Psalm 55:6-8).  Like a drop of food coloring poured into a glass of water, sin tainted everything about human beings and their environment.

36.  “If my circumstances were different, I would be different.”

“I was never an impatient person–until I had these twins!”  Or, “She made me so mad!”  Or, I wouldn’t be so bitter, if my husband hadn’t run off with that other woman.”  We are saying, “Someone or something made me the way I am.”  We feel that if we are different–our upbringing, our environment, the people around us–we would be different.  If our circumstances make us what we are, then we are all victims.  And that’s what the Enemy wants us to believe.  Because if we are victims, then we aren’t responsible–we can’t help the way we are.  But God says we are responsible–not for the failures of others, but for our own responses and lives.  The Truth is, our circumstances do not make us what we are.  They merely reveal what we are–so He can change us.  We play the “if only” game (such as ”If only we had more money…” and “If only I were married to someone different…”).  The Truth is, if we are not content within our present circumstances, we are not likely to be happy in any other set of circumstances.  Elizabeth Prentiss wrote:

We want to know no will but God’s in this question….The experience of the past winter would impress upon me the fact that place and position have next to nothing to do with happiness; that we can be wretched in a palace, radiant in a dungeon….perhaps this heartbreaking is exactly what we need to remind us…that we are pilgrims and strangers on the earth.

George Washington’s wife, Martha, expressed the same conviction in a letter written to her friend Mercy Warren:

I am still determined to be cheerful and happy in whatever situation I may be; for I have also learned from experience that the greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our dispositions and not on our circumstances.  We carry the seeds of the one or the other about with us in our minds, wherever we go.

Paul understood that we may not be able to control our circumnstances, but our circumstances don’t have to control us (Philippians 4:11-12).  The Truth is that we can trust a wise, loving, sovereign God to control every circumstance of our lives.

37.  “I shouldn’t have to suffer.”

Many modern-day evangelistic efforts have promised sinners unending peace, joy, a home in heaven, and a prosperous life between here and there, if they will simply come to Jesus.  That kind of preaching, stripped of the call to disclipleship and cross bearing, has produced a generation of soft, flabby “disciples” who have no stomach for the battles of the Christian life.  When their hopes are dashed by the inevitable trials and tribulations, they whimper and whine and make a dash for the quickest escape route.  By convincing us that our suffering is undeserved or unnecessary, the Enemy succeeds in getting us to resent and resist the will and purpose of God (Acts 14:22).  Arthur Mathews wrote:

We tend to look at the circumstances of lifein terms of what they may do to our cherished hopes and convenience, and we shape our decisions and reactions accordingly.  When a problem threatens, we rush to God, not to seek his prespective, but to ask hi to deflect the trouble.  Our self-concern takes priority over whatever it is that God might be trying to do through the trouble….An escapist generation reads security, prosperity, and physical well-being as evidences of God’s blessing.  Thus when he puts suffering and affliction into our hands, we misread his signals and misinterpret his intentions.

Seventeenth-century Puritan author William Law exhorts us:

Receive every inward and outward trouble, every disappointment, pain, uneasiness, temptation, darkness, and desolation, with both thy hands, as a true opportunity and blessed occasion of dying to self, and entering into a fuller fellowship with they self-denying, suffering Saviour.

The Truth is, God is far more interested in our holiness than in our immediate, temporal happiness–He knows that from apart from being holy, we can never be truly happy.  The Truth is, it is impossible to be holy apart from suffering (Hebrews 2:10, 5:8).  In fact, Peter goes so far as to insist that suffering is our calling (1 Peter 2:21).  True joy is not the absence of pain but the sanctifying, sustaining presence of the Lord Jesus in the midst of the pain.  Through the whole process, we have His promise (1 Peter 5:10).

38.  “My circumstances will never change–this will go on forever.”

The Truth is, your pain may go on for a long time.  But it will not last forever.  It may go on for all of your life down here on this earth.  But even a lifetime is not forever.  The Truth is, a moment or two fro now (in the light of eternity), when we are in the presence of the Lord, everything that has taken place in this life will be just a breath–a comma.  “One day this will all be just a blip on the screen.”  She spoke not as one who is just resigned to her “fate.”  She longs for things to be different now.  But she has a perspective of time and eternity that is enabling her to be faithful in the midst of the “fire.”

Regardless of how long our suffering continues, God’s word assures us that it will not last forever (2 Corinthians 4:16-18, Romans 8:18, Psalm 30:5).  God has determined the exact duration of your suffering, and it will not last one moment longer than He knows is necessary to achieve His holy, eternal purposes in and through your life.  Regardless of how powerful the forces of darkness seem to be here and now, the final chpater has been written–and God wins (Isaiah 35:1,10)!

39.  “I just can’t take it anymore.”

Regardless of what our emotions or our circumstances may tell us, God’s Word says, “My grace is sufficient for you” (2 Corinthians 12:9).  (This is assuming, of course, that I haven’t taken on myself responsibilities He never intended me to carry.  If the burden is God-given, I can go on by His grace.)  One woman wrote and said:

I have one-year-old twin boys who have been chronically sick with ear infections and colds for two months, causing them to be whiny and irritable constantly.  I kept telling myself, my husband, and anyone who would listen, “I can’t take it anymore.”  The lie was a self-fulfilling prophecy, and it was stressing me out.  When I finally said, “Yes, I can take it and I will do my duty to them,” the greatest part of the tension and stress I was feeling dissolved.

Dear child of God, your heavenly Father will never lead you anywhere that His grace will not sustain you.  He will never place more upon you than He will give you grace to bear.  When the path before you seems hopelessly long, take leart.  Lift up your eyes (2 Corinthians 3:10, Philippians 3:8).

40.  “It’s all about me.”

In spite of all the talk about poor self-image, our instinctive reaction to life is self-centered: How does this affect me?  Will this make me happy?  Why did this have to happen to me?  What does she think about me?  It’s my turn.  Where’s my share?  Nobdoy cares about my ideas.  He hurt my feelings.  I’ve got to have some time for me.  I need my space.  He’s not sensitive enough to my needs.  It’s not enough for us to be the center of our own universe.  We want to be the center of everyone else’s universe as well–including God’s.  In his book Finding God, Dr. Larry Crabb offers a penetrating analysis of the extent to which the evangelical church has given in to this deception:

Helping people feel loved and worthwhile has become the central mission of the church.  We are learning not to worship God in self-denial and costly service, but to embrace our inner child, heal our memories, overcome addictions, lift our depressions, improve our self-images, establish self-preserving boundaries, substitute self-love for self-hatred, and replace shame with an affirming acceptance of who we are.  Recovery from pain is absorbing an increasing share of the church’s energy.  And that is alarming…

We have become committed to relieving the pain behind our problems rather than using our pain to wrestle more passionately with the character and purpose of God.  Feeling better has become more important than finding God…As a result, we happily camp on biblical ideas that help us feel loved and accepted, and we pass over Scriputre that calls us to higher ground.  We twist wonderful truths about God’s acceptance, his redeeming love, and our new identity in Christ into a basis for honoring ourselves rather than seeing those truths for what they are: the stunning revelation of a God gracious enough to love people who hated him, a God worthy to be honored above everyone and everything else.

…We have reaaranged things so that God is now worthy of honor because he has honored us.  “Worthy is the Lamb,” we cry, not in response to his amazing grace, but because he has recovered what we value most: the ability to like ourselves.  We now matter more than God.

Paul understood that God does not exist for us, but that we exist for Him (Colossians 1:16-18).  His secret was that he had settled the issue of why he was living.  He was not living to please himself or to get his needs fulfilled.  He had one burning passion: to live for the glory and the pleasure of God.  All that mattered to him was knowing Christ and making Him known to others (Acts 20:24).  “To live is Christ.”  Once that was settled, nothign else mattered much.  Coram Deo is a Latin phrase that means “before the face of God.”  Coram Deo is living all of life, in the presence of God, under the authority of God, and to the glory of God.  I want to close this chapter with three sketches fo women who exemplify what it means to live coram Deo.

“Cindy” got married at the age of 18 and had three children by the time she was 21.  When she was in her thirties, as her mother lay in a hospital in a coma, dying of cancer, Cindy picked up a Gideon Bible and cried out to the Lord to help her.  “From that moment on,” she wrote, “my heart’s desire was to know God.”  There was a vicious cycle of abusive behavior and language, her 14-year-old daughter an away from home, and her two sons were in consistent trouble with the police.  She left her husband for two weeks, intending to divorce him; through a series of circumstances, God gave her a new compassion for him, and she returned home.  In the midst of this, Cindy attended a meeting at a nearby church, where she heard the Good News and gave her heart to Jesus.  Things got worse.  Her daughter ended up on the streets for a year, after her dad would not let her back in the house one day.  Subsequently, the daughter married and had five children; she is now going trough a divorce, after 25 years of marriage.  One son was dishonorably discharged from the Marines and spent four years in prison.  The other became a drug addict and was also dishonorably discharged from the military.  He was involved in a homicide in a tavern and spent 22 years in a penitentiary.  Though he made a profession of faith whil in prison, he no longer shows any interest in spiritual things.  Their father is estranged from them, have not spoken to them in years, and does not know his grandchildren and great-grandchildren.  Cindy continues to reflect:

There are no Christmases or Thanksgivings here at home.  Will my family ever be healed?  Only the Lord knows.  But God is Lord of my life, and I believe He wants to use me to be a testimony and a light for my family.  If I don’t kshow them the truth of God’s amazing grace, who will?  It would be so easy to just walk away and go to some isalnd where there is peace and joy.  But God has chosen me to be where I am, to be a testimony to my unsaved husband and to my children.  How can I help my husband see that one day his pride will be taken away and he will have to face Christ?  How can I help my daughter see the truth of God’s unconditional love?  How can I help my eldest son, who has turned his back on God since leaving prison?  How can I help my husband reconcile with his other son and daguther?  Only through God’s power, wisdom, and love.  So with all my heart, mind, body, and soul, I say, “Yes, Lord–whatever You want me to do.”

Jennie Thompson is a young woman whose husband went to be with the Lord after an intense two-year battle with leukemia.  In a letter written three months after Robert’s home-going, this widow with four boys ages seven and under expresses:

The Lord has been faithful in holding us up through this time.  I wouldn’t in a million years have chosen this path for my life or the lives of my children, but we have learned so much  in and through our circumstances that we could never have learned another way.  God has been honored and glorified in a way that never could have happened without our circumstances, so I must praise Him for those circumstances.  God is not in the business of making us “happy”; His business is to receive the glory that is due Him as our Creator and almighty God.  Our happiness is the by-product of being in and doing His will.  That, and only that, is the reason I can be weeping at the graveside of my best friend, my husband, and the father of my children and still be happy.

Janiece Grissom, my dear friend and longtime prayer partner, was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease at the age of 41.  She was the mother of four children, ages 4 to 12.  Invariably, throughout the next ten months, when she would hear my voice, she would say, “Nancy, you’ve really been on my heart!  How can I pray for you?”  By October 1999, she was confined to a recliner, could not use her limbs, and could only speak with difficulty due to losing 50% of her lung capacity.  Again, I was deeply touched by how God-conscious and God-centered this couple was, even as they faced the ravages of this disease.  I remember Janiece saying over and over that evening, “God has been so good to us!”  We sang one of her favorite hymns, “Like a River Glorious.”  On the evening of December 31, having a feeding tube inserted at the hospital months earlier, she could not speak above a whisper.  “But,” Tim said, “the incredible thing is that she is still spending most of her waking hours praying for other people.”  Within a matter of hours, Janiece breathed her last.  She died the way she lived–selflessly loving God and others.  In her mind, it was never about her–her health, her comfort, her future.  It was all about God–all that mattered was glorifying Him through surrendering to His purposes for her life (Philippians 1:20).  Her sole desire reflects what pastor’s wife and author Susan Hunt wrote:

History is the story of redemption.  This story is much bigger than I.  I am not the main character in the drama of redemption.  I am not the point.  But by God’s grace I am a part of it.  My subplot is integral to the whole.  It is far more significant to have a small part in this story than to star in my own puny production.  This is a cosmic story that will run throughout eternity.  Will I play my part with grace and joy, or will I go for the short-run, insignificant story that really has no point?

AFFIRM the Truth:  Philippians 4:11-13, James 1:2-5, 2 Corinthians 4:16-18, 2 Corinthians 12:7-10

LWB: Ch07: About Children

No greater capacity for joy and love or for disappointment and pain can be found than in a mother’s heart.  She never stops hoping, dreaming, and longing for that child she once cradled in her arms.  It is in this most sensitive of relationships–with their own flesh and blood–that many women find themselves particularly vulnerable to deception.  Satan has a vast arsenal of lies that he uses to deceive a woman in relation to her children and her role as a mother.  His intent is not only to place mothers in bondage, but also to pass his deception down to the next generation.

27.  “It’s up to us to determine the size of our family.”

God is the Creator, Author, and Giver of life.  Satan hates life (John 10:10).  He persuaded Adam and Eve to eat the forbidden fruit, knowing that if they did, they would die.  When they gave birth to two sons, Satan incited the elder to murder his younger brother.  Abortion, infanticide, and homosexuality are examples of life-destroying practices that have become widely tolerated throughout our culture.  But many have come to accept a number of philosophies and practices that are subtly “antichildren” and “antilife.”

One of the fundamental tenets of feminist ideology has always been the right of a woman to determine for herself if and when she will have children and how many children she will have.  Shulamith Firestone spoke for the movement when she insisted: “The heart of woman’s oppression is her childbearing and childrearing roles.”  The Christian world has been unwittingly influenced by this way of thinking, leading to the legitimization and promotion of such practices as contraception, sterilization, and “family planning.”  As a result, unwittingly, millions of Christian women and couples have helped to further Satan’s attempts to limit human reproduction and thereby destroy life.  As Mary Pride points out in her penetrating book The Way Home:

Family planning is the mother of abortion.  A generation had to be indoctrinated in the ideal of planning children around personal convenience before abortion today, and rightly so.  But the reason we have to fight those battles today is because we lost them thirty years ago.  Once couples began to look upon children as creatures of their own making, who they could plan into their lives as they chose or not, all reverence for human life was lost.  Abortion is first of all a heart attitude.  “Me first.”  “My career first.”  “My convenience first.”  “My financial plans first.”  And these exact same choices are what family planning, which the churches have endorsed for  three decades, is all about.

The process by which most people–even “believers”–determine the size of their family is often driven by fear, selfishness, and natural, human reason:

• “How will we ever provide for more children?  We’re barely making ends meet, as it is.  What about college tuition?”
• “I can’t physically handle more children.  I’m exhausted trying to take care of the two I already have.”
• “I just don’t have the patience to handle a lot of children.”
• “If we have more children, we won’t have enough time for us as a couple.”
• ‘My friends [or parents] will think we’re crazy if we have more kids.  They already think we have too many.”
• “If we were to let the Lord decide how many children we should have, we’d have two dozen kids!”

The world says, “Children are a burden.”  God’s Word says children are one of the greatest blessings He can give a couple (Psalm 127:3-5).  Yet we look up to heaven and say, “God, please don’t send any more blessings!”  The world says, “The purpose of marriage is to make you happy.  That may or may not include having children.”  God’s Word, on the other hand, teaches that one of the vital purposes of marriage is to produce children who fear and reverence the Lord (Malachi 2:15).  Childbearing is a basic, God-given role for women (1 Timothy 5:14).  Women will be saved through childbearing (1 Timothy 2:15).  Of course, this is not to suggest that a woman’s eternal salvation is obtained through childbearing.  This verse has the same grammatical construction as Paul’s admonition (1 Timothy 4:16).  Paul is saying that preaching was Timothy’s role, and that perseverance in his calling would accompany genuine conversion.  Preaching was not a means of Timothy’s salvation, but a necessary fruit of it.  Likewise, a woman’s willingness to embrace, rather than shun, her God-given role and calling (”childbearing”) is a necessary fruit that will accompany genuine salvation.  (This is not to say that all women are called by God to marry and bear children, but simply that, generally speaking, this is the central role God has established for women.)

Mary of Nazareth is a beautiful example of a woman who demonstrated faith by her willingness to bear a child, even when it was not in her timing (Luke 1:38). She said, in effect, “You are my Lord.  I am Your servant.  My body is Yours.”  How thankful I am for a mother who responded in the same way.  An accomplished musician, when Nancy Sossomon married Art DeMoss at the age  of nineteen, they planned to wait at least five years so she could continue her vocal career.  However, within the first five years of their marriage, the Lord gave them six children!  Mary of Nazareth and my mother–these women are a picture of the Lord Jesus, who welcomed children into His life, took time for them, and urged his followers to do the same (Matthew 19:13-15).

28.  “Children need to get exposed to the ‘real world’ so that they can learn to function in it.”

Satan uses the same tactics with parents that he used with Eve.  Satan was right–when Eve ate, her eyes were opened (Genesis 3:5-7); she did learn something she had not known before–the experience of evil.  The result of this knowledge was shame, guilt, and alienation from God and her husband.  God never intended that you and I should know evil by experiencing it for ourselves (Romans 16:19).  But Satan says, “You need to taste for yourself.”  He says to parents, “Your children need to taste for themselves.”  The Truth is, our challenge is to bring up children who love God with all their hearts, souls, minds, and strength.  I can’t thank the Lord enough for guiding my parents.  For example, when almost every other little girl was playing with Barbie dolls, we scarcely knew what they were.  She wisely understood that for little girls to play with dolls with fully developed figures would not help to cultivate a godly perspective on sexuality.  When I was a young girl, the nation was in the throes of rebellion, rioting, and revolution.  We were not unaware of these developments, but neither were we hearing about them on the evening news.  My parents believed that some topics were not suitable for children’s minds to ponder, and they felt responsible to shape our views on what was going on in the world. 

The result?  I was a very sheltered young person.  But there are some things I did know that few other young people knew.  I knew the difference between right and wrong.  I had hidden large portions of Scripture in my heart.  I could sing from memory all the stanzas of many theologically rich hymns.  I had read the biographies of many true heroes–men and women such as Hudson Taylor, George Mueller, William Carey, and Gladys Aylward.  More than that, I had a vital, personal relationship with the Lord Jesus. The “faith of our fathers” had become my own.  I’m not boasting–I can’t take any credit–they were gifts from the Lord and from parents who took seriously their responsibility to raise godly daughters and sons.  Children will cultivate an appetite for whatever they are fed in their earliest, formative years.  I can only assume that they have an appetite for what they have been exposed to.

No one would think of taking a young, tender plant and planting it outside on a day like today and have any hope of its surviving.  That’s what a greenhouse is for–to provide an optimum environment for plants to grow.  Then, when their roots have developed and they are strong enough to withstand adversity, they can be transplanted to the outdoors.  When I was seventeen years old, my parents sent me to a secular university in southern California.  I didn’t have an appetite for anything that wasn’t consistent with the Word of God (Romans 12:2).  I had a heart for the people who believed those things and practiced those lifestyles and wanted to see them come to know the Lord (Romans 12:1-2).  But their ways held no appeal to me.

29.  “All children will go through a rebellious stage.”

The Enemy wants parents to believe there is no hope of their children living holy, surrendered lives through their adolescent and young adult years.  Children who know their parents expect them to rebel will likely fulfill that expectation.  The fact is, we are all natural rebels (Psalms 51:5, 58:3, Isaiah 59:2-8).  That’s where the Gospel comes in.  God’s intent was that each successive generation should receive His grace, keep His covenant, and then pass it on to their children.  When seeds of rebellion surface, wise parents do not shrug and say, “I guess all kids ahve to go through this.”  They understand that their children are experiencing physiological an dhormonal changes, but they teach their children how to keep them from ruling their lives (Psalms 103:17, 144:12, Isaiah 54:13).

30.  “I know my child is a Christian because he prayed to receive Christ at an early age.”

Only God knows anyone’s heart.  But He has given us some objective standards by which we may measure a profession of faith.  The essence of true salvation is not a matter of profession or performance; rather, it is a transformation (1 John 2:3-19, 3:10; 2 Corinthians 5:17; Colossians 1:13; Jeremiah 32:40; Hebrews 3:14).  For parents to  assume that their children have been born again when their lives give no such evidence can have several dangerous results (Ephesians 5:5-6).  It can lull those children into a false sense of secuirty about their eternal destiny.  It can keep parents from praying approppriately and waging spiritual battle on behalf of their children’s souls.  It gives rise to a “cheap grace” that demeans the person and blood of Christ.

31.  “We are not responsible for how our children turn out.”

I have observed that the Enemy uses two opposite lies to put parents in bondage.  The first is that they have no control or influence over how their children have turned out–they the situation could not be helped.  Believing this leads parents to throw off personal responsbility and to feel that they are helpless victims.  The second lie is that they are 100% responsible–that it is all their fault.  The Scripture includes accounts of godly men who had ungodly children, as well as ungodly men whose children had a heart for God.  Very little explanation is given for why this is so.  However, we are given some clues that provide insight for parents who want their children to become true followers of Christ.  Even though Lot was a believer, he did not guard his heart; he had an appetite for the things of this world.  By his example, he led his family into a love affair with the world (2 Peter 2:8).  As more than one person has pointed out, “What parents tolerate in moderation, their children will excuse in excess.”

The account of Eli’s family demonstrates the necessity of parents’ establishing godly standards for their children’s behavior and then excercising the necessary discipline to enforce those parameters.  How did a dedicated man of god end up with two such sons (2 Samuel 2:12-17,22)?  We know that at the time of his death, Eli was overweight (1 Samuel 4:18).  Could there be a connection between his lack of physical discipline and his sons’ sin of filling their own bellies with meat they had extorted from those who came to offer sacrifices?  At least on one occasion, Eli confronted his sons about their wicked behavior, but by that time he was “very old” and his sons did not listen to their father’s rebuke (1 Samuel 2:22-25; 29; 3:13). 

These examples do not prove that there is a cause-and-effect relationship between parents’ spirituality and the spiritual outcome in every child.  However, they do illustrate that parents have enourmous influence and are responsible to mold the hearts and lives of their children.  As easy as it is to shift blame to peers, teachers, entertainment, church youth groups, or secular culture, the fact is, we are accountable for the spiritual condition of the flock God has given us to shepherd.  Or course, each individual will one day give account to God for his or her own choices (DeuteronoMy 24:16; Jeremiah 31:29-30).

AFFIRM the Truth:  Psalm 127, Matthew 19:13-15, Psalm 78:1-8, 1 Thessalonians 2:7

Cult of Personality

How Personality Tests Are Leading Us to Miseducate Our Children, Mismanage Our Companies, and Misunderstand Ourselves
by Annie Murphy Paul
(c) 2004

Introduction.  But perhaps the most potent effect of personality testing is its most subtle.  For almost a hundred years it has provided a technology, a vocabulary, and a set of ideas for describing who we are, and many Americans have adopted these as our own.  The judgments of personality tests are not always imposed; often they are welcomed.  And what, some will ask, is wrong with that?  Human beings are complex creatures, and we need simple ways of grasping them to survive.  But how we simplify–which shortcuts we take, which approximations we accept–demands close inspection, especially since these approximations so often stand in for the real thing.  This book tells the story of one very powerful and pervasive way of understanding ourselves: where it came from, why it flourished, and how, too often, it fails us.

1. A Most Typical American.  Phrenology and Walt Whitman.  Like Whitman, Americans seem to have greeted the phrenologists’ counsel with relief and gratitude (while ignoring those recommendations that missed the mark).  One client said that though he had been suffering “painful confusion’s derangement,” after his reading, “doubts and perplexities fled like morning vapors chased away by the rising sun.”  In an expanding economy that could no longer rely on reputation or word of mouth, phrenology was just too useful not to be true. 
             Founder of Emode James Currier says that while some of the tests purport to offer a comprehensive report on the taker’s personality, others are “just for fun,” he says, like “Who’s Your Inner Rock Star?”  Although it just happened a few years ago, the story of Emode’s founding already has the hoary feel of a Gold Rush legend.  The difference is in the ending.  ”Everyone is interested in themselves.  Since the beginning of man, we have always wondered, ‘Who am I?’ and ‘Where do I fit into this world?’  I think these online tests are going directly to the heart of the question.”
2. Rorschach’s Dream.  Bruno Klopfer was firmly on the art side.  His European training, clinical orientation, and empathetic personality inclined him toward a subjective understanding of people and away from what he disdained as the dry formulas of literal-minded psychologists.  He refused to sacrifice insight and intuition to the “goddess ‘Statistic.’”  Samuel Beck stood just as resolutely on the side of science.  Given its repeated death-defying recoveries, the Rorschach should never be counted out entirely.  But James Wood has made a persuasive case that it is bad science: invalid, unreliable, imprecise.  These failings are especially dangerous in settings like the courts, where validity, reliability, and precision are indispensable.  But it is also bad art.  We need art–literature, music, drawings–as well as science to make sense of human nature, and we value it for just those qualities that science can’t provide: its suppleness, its subjectivity, its intimacy.  Today’s Rorschach, with its rigid dictates and picayune rules, can’t provide them either.  
             There is one way, however, in which the Rorschach is indisputably vital, and likely to remain so no matter what the outcome of the psychologists’ debates: as an idea.  Hermann Rorschach contributed to the culture two seminal concepts: that people seek to find meaning where there is none, and that the ways we create meaning are highly individual and idiosyncratic.  As John Exner himself has pointed out, the only logical answer to “What might this be?” is “It’s an inkblot”–but generally, only the severely mentally ill give it.  The rest of us see flamingoes, fairies, butterflies: evidence of an adaptive, and entirely human, need to make the world make sense.  Also, what we attend to and what we ignore, what draws our eye or rouses our imagination–these are telling facts from which we can learn much about ourselves and each other.
3. Minnesota Normals.  Starke Hathaway and J. Charnley McKinley’s Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI).  Using large groups of subjects in psychological research was itself a relatively new phenomenon.  In the discipline’s early days, experiments frequently involved just one participant: the investigator himself.  His method was that of introspection, or observing and recording his own mental processes.  
             Less obvious, though perhaps more troubling, are several other aspects of workplace personality screens.  First, the reflexive testing of job appicants may reduce employers’ incentive to provide a constructive workplace.  If emphasis is placed from the beginning on an employee’s supposedly inherent, unchanging qualities, it’s likely that little energy will go into on-the-job training, mentoring, or development.  Second, the intrusiveness of the tests’ items may itself carry a message.  As social critic Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed, has observed: “Maybe the real function of the tests is not to convey information to the employer but to the potential employee, and the information being conveyed is, “You will have no secrets from us.  We don’t just want your time and your effort, we want your entire self.”  And lastly, recent financial scandals should clue many employers that they’re testing the wrong people.  A true test of integrity would be holding boss and worker to the same ethical standard.  
             The MMPI has stirred controversy in its six decades of existence because it violates a basic tenet of human communication: if you ask someone a question, it’s because you’re interested in the content of the answer.  The MMPI displays a heartless indifference to content, conerning itself only with how a given response “discriminates.” Or consider a second assertion, part of the MMPI’s instructions to test takers from the very beginning: “There are no right or wrong answers.”  Again, in the most literal sense this is true.  But in a real-life sense, with important outcomes–the custody of a child, the sentencingn of a criminal, the offer of a job–riding on the results, this statement is not only inaccurate but dangerously disingenuous.  In testing’s terms, “right” and “wrong,” “normal” and “deviant” are not logical propositions or moral prescriptions.  They are statistical artifacts: what most people do or don’t do.  The MMPI helped to create, and continues to reinforce, a culture in which our unique and varied personalities are subject to the petty tyranny of the average.  Finally, MMPI buffs often assert that the test offers a comprehensive, definitive reading of personality.  But quite the opposite.  It deliberately skims the surface, and that is the secret of its success.  It asks questions, analyzes answers, and doesn’t bother itself with what’s in between.  But what is in between is the person herself, and she is as much a mystery as she ever was.  The danger lies in thinking that because we have labeled personality, we have understood it.  Louise Douce is a Minnesota-trained psychologist who is now director of student counseling at Ohio State University, ”It’s really crazy when you start thinking that the test is what’s true and the person is a reflection of its categories as opposed to the test being a reflection of what’s going on within the person.”  
             The MMPI’s major innovation, however, were the clever devices Hathaway had built into the test to detect false or careless responses.  The Feeble-mindedness Scale was meant to identify test takers who could not read the items or who were responding randomly.  Even more ingenious was the Lie Scale, intended to foil those who would deliberately place themselves in a flattering light.  Interestingly, high scores on the Lie Scale are not infrequently obtained by members of the clergy–who might really be saintly, or who might feel the need to prsent themselves that way.  Most sophisticated of all was the Correction Scale, which came about after Hathaway noticed that obviously disturbed patients occasionally generated perfectly normal results.  With a student, Paul Meehl, he developed a scale to detect “defensive” responding by mentally ill people wily enough to answer as if they were sane.
             As he grew older, Hathaway began to question whether the assessment of perosnality was possible at all.  “Everyone knows the word ‘ghost’ adn we use it for communication; but most of us would not seriously expect to devise a ghost-measuring or analyzing test,” he mused.  “By analogy I often have serious doubts about whether it is meaningful to expect that we can develop tests to measure or analyze personality.”  Perhaps the essence of who we are will always elude capture; perhaps, he concluded, “personality is a ghost!”  Early in his career Hathaway had tried to break down human nature, to take it apart and see how it worked.  Once he’d done so, he found that the thing he was looking for was no longer there.
4. Deep Diving.  Henry Murray and Christiana Morgan’s Thematic Apperception Test (TAT).  Murray had always been conscious that beneath his “sanguine surplus,” as he called his abundance of expansive energy, there was a contrasting “marrow of misery and melancholy,” a streak of sadness and even despair.  Murray found himself confessing his darkest secret: he was desperately in love.  Though his wife, heiress Josephine Rantoul, was a kind and loving woman, she “had few intellectual interests, almost nil,” he said.  By contrast, he and Christiana “talked alike and thought alike.”  She was moody, intense, volativel–drawn, like Murray, to the shadowy side of life.  Together the two went “deep diving,” as they called it, plunging into their own psyches and into the art, literature, and philosophy that fed their understanding of the mind’s hidden currents.  Their emotional and intellectual bond was intensified by a poweful sexual attraction, one they had not acted upon–yet.  If Murray wondered at his own candor, he was even more astnoished by his confidant’s response: Jung revealed that he had once faced the same dilemma.  In the “dark years” following his painful break with his mentor, Sigmund Freud, Jung had found solace with a former analysand named Antonia Wolff.  Unwilling to give up either his wife or his mistress, he persuaded the women to allow him both.  As if to show Murray how the arrangement worked, Jung took him back to the house in Kusnacht.  There, calmly serving tea together, were Toni Wolff and Emma Jung.
             In line with Murray’s rebel reputation, the work at the clinic was unusual in several respects.  It was not limited by the confines of a particular school or even the boundaries of psychology.  He even revered the novel Moby Dick and regarded its author as “the greatest depth psychologist America ever produced.”  He referred to the building as “the Baleen” and smiled when his students called him “the Skipper.”  A second point of departure: Murray was interested in normal personality, not the deviations introduced by disease.  Because he was convinced that “a person is different in different contexts and with different people at different times,” these young men would be examined by a diverse group of judges, whose observations would ultimately be synthesized into a single report.
             The English gentleman scientist Francis Galton had gone there first.  In 1879 he disclosed the startling results of his “word-association experiment”: “No one can have just idea, before he has carefully experimented upon himself, of the crowd of unheeded half-thoughts and faint imagery that flits through his brain, and of the influence they exert upon his conscious life.”  This simple task revealed his inner self so starkly it was almost embarrassing: such responses, he reported, “lay bare the foundations of a man’s thoughts with a curious distinctness and exhibit his mental anatomy with more vividness and truth than he would probably care to publish to the world.”  The two scientists were united in their conviction that unconscious forces drive much of our behavior (those who deny it, Jung wrote, “do not see the spectacles which they wear on their noses”).  Murray suspected other catalysts–literature, music, art–could expose them still further.
             In 1939, psychology started to catch up.  Psychologist Lawrence Frank gave a name to tests like the TAT: “projective methods.”  When we experience an unacceptable thought or feeling, we cast it outward onto objects or others.  If test givers could provide a target for projection, they could deliberately elicit from test takers information of which the indviduals themselves were unaware.  The first lesson of projective techniques is that we are not as we seem.  According to Murray, when we appear to be one thing on the surface, we are likely to be its opposite underneath.  Its second claim is that we are just as unfamiliar with our inner selves as our unsuspecting friends and neighbors.  Few people would go so far; for most, he wrote, such introspection “is as distressing as the reopening of an old wound.”  So we remain strangers to ourselves.  An elegant demonstration of this phenomenon was offered by the work of German psychologist Werner Wolff, who began one experiment by photographing the hands of a group of people who knew each other well.  When he presented the images to the participants, many competently matched pictures to subjects while failing to recognize their own body parts.
             Henry Murray played no part in this efflorescence; he didn’t even meet Douglas Bray until 1983.  He was completely unaware that his example at Station S had spawned hundreds of assessment centers in the United States and abroad.  In their broad outlines, the centers are essentially civilian versions: simulated situations, observed by a group of judges, who pool their ratings to produce a collective evaluation of each candidate. Tthe average assessment center conducts seven exercises over the course of two days.  Too bad this seemingly positive and humane process is too extensive and expensive, reserved for executives and others of high rank.
             On this day in March 2003, Glenn Livingston is demonstrating the use of a “modified TAT” for a gathering of professional market researchers.  A researcher shows an ad to a consumers and asks them to tell stories about what’s going on in the ad.  By analyzing these stories, the researcher can explore the fantasies and emotions the image evokes.  “We’re looking for the soul of a person’s relationship with a product.”  The leading appropriator was a Viennese-born psychoanalyst named Ernest Dichter.  Central to his approach was his conviction that people didn’t know or didn’t want to acknowledge why they bought things, so it was useless to question them directly.
             The McCann-Erickson advertising agency, for example, set out to discover why sales of Combat insecticide disks lagged behind those of Raid roach spray in some markets, even though thte disks were easier to use.  A hundred low-income Southern women depicted roaches as men when asked to draw pictures of the bugs they were trying to eradicate.  A roach “only comes around when he wants food.”  For these consumers, the disks were too easy to use; “they used the spray because it allowed them to participate in the kill.”
             In the hands of literal-minded psychologists, even his inspired tAT had become just another way to package people in boxes.  “Americans have fashioned a cosmetic culture, in which a pleasing appearance at quick contacts is the thing that counts.  A successful personality can be bought (and paid for).  Our civilization is skin-deep, and the best epidermis triumphs.  This is all part and parcel of the race for goods, comfort, and social recognition.  It is the ideology of big business.”  His fellow citizens, he accused caustically in 1940, had traded “surfaces fo depth, gadgets for great ideas, behaviorisms for feeling, craft for faith, skill for wisdom, ostensible success for inward joy.”
5. First Love.  Isabel Myers and Katharine Briggs’ Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI).  The true source of her drive was a passionate belief in the importance of her work.  From her original intention of helping wartime Americans find suitable jobs, her ambition for the Indicator had expanded: it became nothing less than a way to change the world.  On an individual level, the awareness of psychological type it provided made life “more amusing, more interesting and more of a daily adventure,” she declared.  On a societal level, the test could do even more: “It is not too much to hope that wider and deeper understanding of the gifts of diversity may eventually reduce the misuse and nonuse of those gifts.  It should lessen the waste of potential, the loss of opportunity, and the number of dropouts and delinquents.  It may even help with the prevention of mental illness.”
             There were a few protests against this tidy system.  “It will not do to assume that certain jobs can be successfully handled only by a narrowly limited range of character types,” demurred sociologist David Riesman.  “Actually, people of radically different types can adapt themselves to perform, adequately enough, a wide variety of complex tasks.”
             The test did not gain a firm foothold in mainstream psychology until it was discoverd by a woman named Mary McCaulley.  “That’s just how I feel,” they told her when she described to her students their type, expressing relief that “it’s okay to be my kind of person.”  One test taker told her, “I feel like it X-rayed my soul!”  The two women found they were both INFPs–the type, said Myers, shared by “everyone who has fallen in love with the Indicator without anyone else telling them about it.”  Indeed, McCaulley conceived a passion for the test that rivaled Myers’s own.  “When I discovered your work,” she wrote to Myers, “it seemed as if I had found something I was looking for all my life.”  Psychological type gave her a feeling of meaning and purpose, and a satisfying sense of belonging: “It was as if I had come home.”
             The year 1979 also marked a bittersweet development: the publication of Please Understand Me.  Myers harbored no envy or will will: her one aim was to share the benefits of psychological type with as many people as possible.  In the months before her death in May 1980 she was still at work, correcting the proofs of Gifts Differing (”Isabel is the only author we’ve ever had who, when you send a manuscript you have carefully edited, reedits the whole thing back to her original”).
             The conversion is complete once she turns discussion over to the small groups.  Shoya Zichy has directed them to make lists: how they describe themselves, what they admire and what they find irritating about the other groups.  The intuiting-feelres are huddled together, conversing intimately.  “I just met these people, and I feel like I’ve known them forever!” one exclaims.  Isabel Myers once told a friend that if she’d known about type before she met Chief, she probably wouldn’t have married him.
             The sly brilliance of using a personality test to label employees is that, by dint of answering the test’s questions, employees appear to be labeling themselves.  Once that tag has been affixed, certain capacities and limitations “naturally” follow, all of them defined and determined by the employer.  Employees are often encouraged to embrace this assigned identity, to wear it almost literally on their sleeve.  Under this banner of respect for individuality, there’s no bad worker and no bad workplace, only a bad “fit” between the two.  It’s a conveniently fatalistic philosophy: workers can’t be trained in new skills or grow into new responsibilities, and workplaces can’t be expected to accommodate their developing needs and abilities.
             But how to explain the most startling aspect of the Indicator’s popularity–its ardent embrace by individuals?  The epiphany Zichy and McCaulley experienced upon first encountering type is so common that it has a name: “the ‘aha’ reaction, an expression of delight that so often came with a person’s recognition of some aspect of their personality identified by the Indicator.”  Of course, few test takers could fidn the MBTI actively objectionable; it’s too determinedly innocuous for that.  but for some significant number of people, the earth moves, the heavens open, the world suddenly makes sense.  These are the people who immediately figure out the type of everyone they know, whose everyday speech becomes an alphabet soup of Indicator acronyms, who can explain just about every situation they encounter with reference to the types of the individuals involved.  Once their infatuation is in full bloom, type devotees may seek out others who share their passion.  “The type community is like Machu Pichu.”
             Why do so many people fall in love with the MBTI?  One of its principal attractions is no doubt its reassuring confirmation of what we already know about ourselves.  Unlike projective techniques, which claim to confront us with detritus dredged from our unconcious, the MBTI repackages a shallow self-appraisal in a more appealing form.  Another aspect is its comforting stability (as cozy and familiar as an old sweater) because a person’s type does not change.  It instantly confers a clear, firm identity, often just at the moment when it is most needed: when people are switching jobs, looking for a partner, feeling lost and purposeless.  And Myers’s relentlessly positive orientation ensures that everyone’s permanent personality is a good one.  It also offers an attractive way to understand relationships with others.  No longer complicated and mysterious, friends, family, and acquaintances are now easily understood with reference to their types: “She’s a total ESFP.”  Conflicts are not due to genuine differences of opinion or interest, but simply to the divergent ways various types comprehend and communicate.  Even as it elides real differences in philosophy, politics, and status, the Indicator offers test takers an imagined bond with others of their type.  Although personality tests ostensibly isolate the ways in which we’re unique, the MBTI often seems aimed at subsuming individuality in a convivial crowd.  “It lets people know that they’re not alone.” 
             In short, it’s not so much diagnostic as therapeutic, not about exploring people’s personalities but about making people feel better.  In this sense, the “aha moment” experienced by many of its fans really does mark a transformation.  The test taker is no longer an ambivalent, uncertain individual, struggling along in a confusing and sometimes unfriendly world.  With the help of the MBTI, she’s become a person with a firmly fixed identity, occupying a snug niche in an orderly universe full of people just like her.  Could thousands of MBTI devotees have been deceived?  Its overwhelming popularity can be explained by the “Barnum effect,” which offers “a little something for everybody.”  The personality descriptions offer enough hedged statements and vague commonplaces to allow any individual to read and think, “Yep, that’s me.”  A finding with particular relevance for the MBTI is that individuals are more likely to endorse positive accounts of themselves, a phenomenon scientists call the “Pollyanna principle.”  One recalls another quip from which P. T. Barnum was famous: “There’s a sucker born every minute.”
             The warnings of academic psychology seem to have dissuaded few admirers of the MBTI.  Their passion for the test is a matter of emotion rather than rational analysis; they are engaged, it might be said, in a romance.  Those who love type have been seduced by an image of their own ideal self, have fallen hard for a rosy vision of their own potential.  In the blush of this infatuation, science’s dour pronouncements are as little heeded as the admonitions of disapproving parents.
             In any case, psychological type has built a private world around itself, an intimate universe that has no need for external validation.  For those within its charmed circle, it provides an unwavering self-conception, a foundation for relating to others, a plan for success, and an excuse for failure.  It even offers an explanation for why some people refuse to join in: it is, of course, because of their type.  Perceivers dont’ want to be restricted, introverts don’t want to reveal themselves, sensers find the theory too abstract, and so on.  Types professional orbit is similarly circumscribed.  Not for nothing is the biennial gathering of devotees called “World of Type.”
             They, like Myers, appear to value type more than the people type is supposed to describe.  Although Myers referred often to Jung, her test does not really descent from his deeply humanistic approach to personality.  If she truly was a “genius,” her inspiration lay in marrying an industry-friendly management tool with a user-friendly form of therapy.  The MBTI helps institutions find human cogs for their machines, and helps humans feel happy being cogs. This odd-couple pairing carried the Indicator far away from the spirit of Jung’s thoughts.  While Jung allowed that “type is nothing static.  It changes in the course of life,” Myers insisted that it was inborn and immutable.  While Jung cautioned that “it is often very difficult to find out whether a person belongs to one type or the other, especially in regard to oneself, ” Myers asserted that personality is evident in “a few basic, observable differences in mental functioning.”  And while Jung was interested in complicating, even enchanting our world and the people in it (”Every individual is a exception to the rule”), Myers seemed determined to tidy it up, make it neat.
6. Child’s Play.  Dr. Kenneth Bancroft Clark’s Doll Test, the Environment, and Children.  “Are there any methods which are scientifically accurate with which a psychiatrist can test a child and determine whether or not an isolated fact like racial segregation has any effect upon his personality growth or development?”  His doll tests were no dry laboratory experiments, but tiny dramas inflamed by the pain of racism.  Responding to Clark’s queries, black children did not just choose the white doll to play with; they actively disparaged the dark-skinned doll, calling it “dirty” and “bad.”  When he asked his young subjects which doll was “like you,” they often became agitated.  “A great many of the children react as if I were he devil in hell, myself, when I ask this final question,” Clark recounted ruefully.  “Some of them break down and leave the testing station; they cry…It is as if I had tricked them.”
             Personality psychology and testing had an especially checkered past.  As often as it had been used to question our ideas about who we are, it had offered a convenient prop for the status quo.  Minorities and women, for example, were early on regarded as too undifferentiated even to possess unique personalities.  Variations among ethnic groups began to attract more attention around the turn of the century, when changing patterns of immigration led researchers to compare Americans of Anglo-Saxon stock with newer arrivals from southern and eastern Europe.  Not surprisingly, the results confirmed the assumed superiority of northern Europeans, leading some social scientists to urge restrictions on immigration from less-favored countries.  This was “race psychology,” a doctrine that held that individuals’ personality and other characteristics were determined by their ethnicity.
             The traumas of the twentieth century–two world wars, the Great Depression–made it abundantly clear that events could alter personality.  Some advanced the theory that “authoritarianism”–the propensity to blindly follow a reactionary leader–was actually a personality type rooted in childhood experiences characterized by obsessive conformity, extreme rigidity, and deep insecurity expressed as a hatred of outsiders and minorities.  Adolf Hitler’s atrocities made horrifyingly real the dangers of classifying people by supposedly inherent characteristics.  And the ascendance of psychoanalytic and anthropological perspectives on personality placed new emphasis on environmental influences, especially child rearing within culture.  Many of Clark’s professional colleagues shared his jubilation, viewing the decision from Brown v. Board of Education as a victory not only for civil rights, but for psychology.
             The psychologist John Buck resolved to create a test that would take advantage both of the insights offered by the drawings themselves and of what he caled the “pencil-release factor,” the fact that children spoke more freely while absorbed in the activity of sketching.  Looking for a way to share this epiphany with others, Don Lowry adapted his True Colors insights about personality to a format he calls “edutainment.”  “Being attentive to and responding to the needs, interests, and abilities of individual students seems like a worthwhile goal for teachers.  However, doing so is much more complex than administering a learning-style inventory and matching teaching strategies to student learning styles,” says Robert Brown, emeritus professor of educational psychology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
             Fuzzy, feel-good rhetoric (”just as each snowflake, tree, and star in the universe is diferent, so it is with children,” coos the promotional materials) disguises the fact that these tests are used to rank and track children in disturbing ways.  For example, the Oakland’s Student Styles Questionnaire contends that black students may drop out of school at a higher rate because they “are more likely than whites to base their decisions on ‘thinking’ rather than ‘feeling’ styles.  ‘Thinkers’ value honesty even if it hurts the feelings of others, while people with a ‘feeling’ orientation are more inclined toward harmony.” 
             Stereotypes of gender as well as race are reinforced by this personality test: starting as early as age eight, says Oakland, female students are more likely than their male counterparts to score as “feelers.”  In order “to be more effective in life,” he opines, girls who are labeled “thinkers” “need to acquire a respect for harmony and for relying on and developing their feeling capacities and displaying other feminine qualities.”  In this way, the apparently benign personality testing of children provides convenient cover for the less appealing agendas of adults.  “Instead of telling someone ‘You’re not college prep material,’ you can tell them what they might be interested in based on the color they are.”  More important, they continue to believe that the conclusions they draw from the tests are correct.  This phenomenonis called “illusory correlation,” or the human tendency to associate two variables that are actually unrelated.
             But for all his resounding conviction, Clark was beginning to suspect a terrible truth.  From its founding, psychology had been embraced by institutions eager to take advantage of its tools.  “Should social scientists play a role in helping governmental agencies and key policy makers make more effective and valid decisions?” he asked rhetorically.  Institutions had long answered yes.  So why the shrill objections when social science ventured to particpatein America’s debate about race?  The answer was as dismaying as it was inescapable: because in this case, pyschology supported the weak against the strong, the minority against the majority.
7. The Stranger.  Raymond Cattell’s Beyondism and the Big Five.  In their search for truth, some researchers are so fanatical they inspire jokes about making science into a religion.  Raymond Cattell was such an investigaor, and inhis case it was no jest.  He preached the strange doctrine of “Beyondism,” a religion he invented. 
             The idea behind what is known as the “lexical hypothesis” is beautifully simple: if an important aspect of personality exists, people will have invented a word for it.  The more significant a quality is, the more synonyms our language will offer to describe it.  His research identified sixteen factors, building blocks of personality that he calimed constituted “natural elements.”  He called these 16 basic attributes the “Universal Index,” numbering them UI 1 to UI 16, juast as chemists using the periodic table would label oxygen or hydrogen.  To measure these characteristics he created the Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire (16PF).
             Again, Francis Galton had been first on the scene, coining the term eugenics from the Greek word for “good in birth.”  The evolutionary theories of his cousin, Charles Darwin, persuaded Galton that human beings ought to approach the business of procreation more deliberately.  Imagine “the galaxy of genius” that might be created if only a “twentieth part of the cost and pain were spent in measures for the improvement of the human race that is spent on the improvement of the breed of horses and cattle.”  Galton even fantasized about a government-sponsored eugenic competition in which the ten fittest men would be married off to the ten fittest women, in a state wedding at which the Queen herself would give away the brides.  
             It was Lord of the Flies on a monstrous scale, with a band of “qualified elites” supervising the vicious play.  The scheme, he acknowledged, would turn traditional morality on its head, since the ethics preached by Beyondism “are apparently the exact opposite of those which religion and humanity have bred into our bones.”  Human groups must be let alone to flourish or founder; helping people in groups other than one’s own would be a sin, because it impedes the free functioning of evolution.  Another example: there may come a time when a group should be forced to eliminate itself, for its own good and for the good of humanity (he coined the term genthanasia).  (In time, Cattell did modify his opinions from state-enforced to voluntary eugenics.  He encouraged, for example, his students to have more children.)
             Walter Mischel pointed out that personality tests don’t do a very good job of predicting how human swill act.  He observed that our actions are driven not only by our personalities, but by the situations in which we find ourselves.  We adjust our behavior according to our role (worker, parent, friend), to the occasion (a meeting, a family outing, a party), and to a thousand other details of our ever-changing environment.  Such mutability, though “acknowledged in the abstract” was ignored by them in practice, largely because it seemed to defeat the possibility of accurate measurement.
             But in the years following Cattell’s publications, others pursued the possibility that it could be described by fewer than 16 factors.  As scientists in various laboratories began conducting independent investigations (Fiske, Tupes, Christal, Norman, Digman), the same number kept showing up (5).  Paul Costa Jr. and Robert McCrae named theirs the NEO PI-R (neuroticism, extroversion, openness to experience, abgreeableness, and conscientiousness).  Is the search for the single key over?  The Big Five has even been applied to the effort to endow products with particular “personalities.”  Hallmark cards ooze Sincerity, Guess jeans embody Sophistication, and other brands have Excitement, Competence, and Ruggedness.
             Clambering aboard the Five-Factor Model means accepting a whole host of assumptions.  It spurns that we are driven by forces deeply rooted and incompletely understood (Murray), that some will deliberately misreprsent themselves (Hathaway), and that we are molded by social forces (Clark).  Advocates also make proudly explicit some assumptions that in earlier tests were quietly implied.  For example, they deny that behavior varies much across situations; “Personality is Transcontextual.”  (So much for  the amiable compromise of interactionism; it’s as if Mischel never made his critique.)  Neither do they believe that personality changes much over time.  The model “may be a human universal.  The fact that the five factors are found in many different cultures suggests that they are basic features of human nature itself.”
             Some critics fault the test for its sloppy construction, as well as its omission of scales that would identify test takers who misrepresent themselves.  A study published that subjects could “fake good,” so the ease with which it can be manipulated will become more problematic as it is used more frequently in the world outside the lab.  The authors are “getting carried away” with the notion that it is useful for everything from vocational counseling to diagnosing mental illness.  Others’ reservations go deeper, reaching down to the lexical hypothesis.  Language may not provide an accurate representation of perosnality: the words that make it into a dictionary are likely to be those that affluent, educated groups find useful, or that describe social and commercial intercourse rather than more intimate or even interior transactions.  Similary, we have many terms to describe human qualities but very few to describe situations, infinitely varied as they are.  Others claim the universality of the Big Five are premature.  It “is reproduced better in some languages than in others,” and noted that others have identified an alternative set of five factors in Italian and Hungarian, and had found seven factors in both Hebrew and Tagalog.  Interestingly, the five-factor model, founded as it is on the expression of peronal styles and preferences, appears better able to predict behavior in autonomous, individualist cultures than in collectivist, community-based ones.
             The most compelling critique of the Big Five, offered by Northwestern University psychologist Dan McAdams, begins by acknowledging the usefulness of the model.  An awareness of where a person stands on the five factors, he says, “is indeed crucial information in the evaluation of strangers and others about whom we know very little.  It is the kind of information that strangers quickly glean from one another as they size one another up and anticipate future interactions.”  But this aspect is precisely its limitation.  Once it has yielded its effective speed-read of personality, it cannot offer any deeper or more profound knowledge of an individual’s character.  It thus traffics, in his resonant phrase, in “a psychology of the stranger.”  To get beyond a psychology of the stranger, several additional types of information are required–the kinds of insights that all of us habitually seek out when getting to know a new person.  One of these is contingent infromation; the way an individual responds in different moods or situations.  Ohter sorts of information include knowledge about how people’s personalities have changed and developed over their lifetimes; the cultures–ethnic, religious, social, professional–in which they are immersed; the current concerns and anxieties they harbor; the political beliefs and value systems to which they subscribe; the desires and goals they hold for the future.  A theory of personality assessment that takes heed of such variables has some claim to true intimacy and familiarity; a theory that neglects them will find itself among strangers.  Says one critic: “The Big Five makes me think of being up in a spaceship, looking down at the planet below and seeing five continents.  That’s useful to know, but once you’re back on Earth, it won’t help you find your way home.”
8. Uncharted Waters.  Technology and the Life Story Approach.  “No one has ever seen personality.”  Dont’ tell that to Turhan Canli.  He believes discrepancies in fMRIs reveal an intrinsic differencein the way people with varied personalities process information about the world.  Extroverts, it seems, are wired to respond automatically and affirmatively to positive stimuli (their brains bloomed with activity when shown pictures of babies and puppies), while introverts are not (their brains remained quiescent).  Such individual differences in brain reactivity, amount to a pe