Note: It may be helpful to read my introduction to this series in order to have some context and understand my disclaimers. You can find that post here.
“Guidelines are great, but they are no substitute for common sense.”
For me, this video was not the most inspiring in Rowe’s series, but the content is decent, and the point is well taken. Even though people tell you that your safety is their priority, it does not remove it from being your responsibility. I think this goes for a lot of other things as well, not just safety. People might say this about your education or your success — they would suggest it is their priority; however, that doesn’t mean it stops being your responsibility.
I like it. There won’t be a lot to say here. Pretty straightforward.
But one passing thought: Some of these same ideas are relevant in a culture that loves to blame others for our circumstances. We love to point fingers and talk about how our situation is brought about by our family, our employer, our government, our neighborhood, our school. We go on endless rants about how somebody else’s mistakes have created my mess.
And this may even be true some of the time.
And I’m definitely not suggesting accountability doesn’t matter or that we shouldn’t fight for justice. That is not my point at all, and anybody who knows me will know I am a big proponent of pursuing those things.
But there is a very significant line crossed when the objectivity of pursuing justice, mercy, and accountability becomes the subjectivity of blame.
People (especially leaders) should be held accountable for the worlds they create.
But we are responsible — solely — for how we respond to our circumstances. And I do get frustrated when people pick one of these sides and denounce the other. They are not mutually exclusive. I say that with all of the awareness of the comfort and privilege I bring to the conversation. As a white male, my list of circumstances working against me is horribly short. And yet, some of the people who have taught me the most about responsibility (especially in the last few years) have been people with much less privilege and comfort than I have.
So accountability does not remove responsibility. And responsibility does not remove the need for accountability. Can both of these statements be true? I certainly hope so.
What does this mean for you and your circumstances? It is not for me to say. I cannot understand what it is to walk in your shoes and I cannot apply wisdom in your life (only my own); but together, we learn from each other.
8.29.2019
8.19.2019
A (Potential) Bad Decision
Note: It may be helpful to read my introduction to this series in order to have some context and understand my disclaimers. You can find that post here.
This video is wonderfully straightforward. And while there are a couple of things I’m not necessarily interested in (the conspiracy theory mentality is just a little thick in this video, and the promotion for his foundation is beside the point for my purposes), I don’t think I would or could add much to his argument. As someone who is around universities and students for my job every day, I can tell you that this problem is real.
And that probably makes me a really bad campus minister.
But I don’t actually believe it does. I do think there needs to be a market adjustment on the industry of secondary education, but I don’t believe (nor does Mike Rowe) that the institution itself is broken. The university is still an essential place where many vocational pursuits receive specialized training necessary for a given job. I can hardly imagine a world without people trained in medical or legal fields. Engineering allows so much of our world to exist effectively and efficiently. And I need people trained in history, economics, political science, and the like to help lead us.
But what Rowe said in this video is so true. This is not how we’ve been selling university education.
When I was in high school (and I’m not aware of this changing much in recent years), the impression was that college is an absolute must if I want to be “successful” or even simply survive with a family in the future. I got lucky: I went to a very affordable Bible college and was able to, with the help of my family, escape without student loans. But this is becoming more and more of a miracle in today’s experience. And while undergraduate and graduate level training is actually quite effective and useful in many ways, it is not delivering what we were promised. It is developing us as human beings (at least in some ways), but it is not producing jobs.
It used to be true that if you went to college, you were almost guaranteed a starting position in your career field. That is no longer true. Such education used to be affordable; but as you saw depicted the video, this is no longer true. College is no longer (for many) the ticket it used to be, and it is no longer (for many) a wise investment. But we were all told that this is where the path to success starts. For far too many, it is no longer leading to the same destination.
I can tell you that classmates who did not go to college are a few steps ahead if they simply applied themselves and began a practice of hard work. To be sure, their earning potential is often much less than my college-trained counterparts, but the latter are so saddled with crippling debt and had such a slow start on their earning potential that they cannot round the curve.
Meanwhile, an entire generation has bought into a counter-productive narrative (when thinking of the Kingdom of God) that fills them with insecurity and leaves them empty of meaning.
It may be time we quit feeding the same trope of what leads to success and start teaching how to ask a better set of questions. To be sure, I hope our college campuses continue to be filled with people who are convinced of their calling and driven to be trained in their specialized field. I hope these students experience training that is more intentional and a job market that is more balanced with people who have a better understanding of what they do — but even more importantly, who they are.
If we are an organization that believes when we impact the U, we impact the world, then we have to take that logic out beyond the walls of the university campus. To be sure, tomorrow’s leaders are on our university campuses. But they can also be at our trade schools and our community colleges. They can be taking classes in the School of Life Experience. These people, with or without four-year degrees, will be tomorrow’s parents, artists, small business owners, and church leaders. We might even see a world where they can be our political leaders and representatives.
If all of this is possible without being enslaved to crippling debt, this world will be a better place. I hope for people to be found in our university classrooms, but I hope those rooms are filled with more and more of the right people. I hope those who have been fed a line will find the right place in a world that needs their leadership so badly — a place just as fulfilling and necessary.
This video is wonderfully straightforward. And while there are a couple of things I’m not necessarily interested in (the conspiracy theory mentality is just a little thick in this video, and the promotion for his foundation is beside the point for my purposes), I don’t think I would or could add much to his argument. As someone who is around universities and students for my job every day, I can tell you that this problem is real.
And that probably makes me a really bad campus minister.
But I don’t actually believe it does. I do think there needs to be a market adjustment on the industry of secondary education, but I don’t believe (nor does Mike Rowe) that the institution itself is broken. The university is still an essential place where many vocational pursuits receive specialized training necessary for a given job. I can hardly imagine a world without people trained in medical or legal fields. Engineering allows so much of our world to exist effectively and efficiently. And I need people trained in history, economics, political science, and the like to help lead us.
But what Rowe said in this video is so true. This is not how we’ve been selling university education.
When I was in high school (and I’m not aware of this changing much in recent years), the impression was that college is an absolute must if I want to be “successful” or even simply survive with a family in the future. I got lucky: I went to a very affordable Bible college and was able to, with the help of my family, escape without student loans. But this is becoming more and more of a miracle in today’s experience. And while undergraduate and graduate level training is actually quite effective and useful in many ways, it is not delivering what we were promised. It is developing us as human beings (at least in some ways), but it is not producing jobs.
It used to be true that if you went to college, you were almost guaranteed a starting position in your career field. That is no longer true. Such education used to be affordable; but as you saw depicted the video, this is no longer true. College is no longer (for many) the ticket it used to be, and it is no longer (for many) a wise investment. But we were all told that this is where the path to success starts. For far too many, it is no longer leading to the same destination.
I can tell you that classmates who did not go to college are a few steps ahead if they simply applied themselves and began a practice of hard work. To be sure, their earning potential is often much less than my college-trained counterparts, but the latter are so saddled with crippling debt and had such a slow start on their earning potential that they cannot round the curve.
Meanwhile, an entire generation has bought into a counter-productive narrative (when thinking of the Kingdom of God) that fills them with insecurity and leaves them empty of meaning.
It may be time we quit feeding the same trope of what leads to success and start teaching how to ask a better set of questions. To be sure, I hope our college campuses continue to be filled with people who are convinced of their calling and driven to be trained in their specialized field. I hope these students experience training that is more intentional and a job market that is more balanced with people who have a better understanding of what they do — but even more importantly, who they are.
If we are an organization that believes when we impact the U, we impact the world, then we have to take that logic out beyond the walls of the university campus. To be sure, tomorrow’s leaders are on our university campuses. But they can also be at our trade schools and our community colleges. They can be taking classes in the School of Life Experience. These people, with or without four-year degrees, will be tomorrow’s parents, artists, small business owners, and church leaders. We might even see a world where they can be our political leaders and representatives.
If all of this is possible without being enslaved to crippling debt, this world will be a better place. I hope for people to be found in our university classrooms, but I hope those rooms are filled with more and more of the right people. I hope those who have been fed a line will find the right place in a world that needs their leadership so badly — a place just as fulfilling and necessary.
8.08.2019
Bringing the "Awesome" to Anything
Note: It may be helpful to read my introduction to this series in order to have some context and understand my disclaimers. You can find that post here.
In this conversation, Mike Rowe speaks against this common idea of “following your passion.” I think Mike might say this idea falls squarely in the realm of the less mature, pre-conventional wisdom. He suggests passion is not something you follow, but instead something you bring with you.
One of the things we are intentionally working on at Impact Campus Ministries is the art of sacred vocation. We have a fundamental belief that all work is holy and sacred. There is a sanctity to a vocation that is often overlooked. Why is vocation holy and sacred? Because vocation is, in its essence, about the proper ordering and stewarding of God’s creation. For centuries, Christian theology has unintentionally (I hope) pulled apart soil and spirit, giving the impression that the “Kingdom work” is done by clergy and missionaries, while the rest of the parishioners essentially make money to help the real work happen. They rub shoulders with the unsaved at their places of employment. They bring the money and “the lost” to the conversation and the holy folks do the spiritual work.
But this is not grounded in good theology. God is putting the whole world back together, bringing shalom to the physical chaos of creation. What this means is that the real work is done by those people who have their hands in the soil (literally or otherwise). It is the job of the clergy to help others see why their work matters. The non-clergy folks are actually engaging in the ends and not the means to that end. It’s all holy and spiritual work, but the clergy are engaging in the means to the Kingdom end — we usually have it backward!
This is so important in the conversation Rowe begins above, and yet one of the hardest ideas to grasp is where the passion lies. For many, the conversation about sacred vocation revolves around the idea that they must find the perfect vocation where their true passion lies.
But as Rowe points out, this is backward thinking.
Passion does not lie in the content of the vocation; passion describes the way we engage vocation in the first place. I think some of us go through life looking for the thing in our future that will give us passion when that passion is already within us and would transform the way we engage with our present.
One of the values at ICM is passion. We use this word to talk about the energy we bring to our pursuit of God. In this case, it is fitting that Rowe’s point is we bring passion to our work. In the same way passion describes the energy we bring to our pursuit of God, passion also describes the energy we bring to our vocation.
We have all met people who remind us of Les (from Mike’s video). They aren’t driven by their circumstances but bring a passion that affects the circumstances around them. It might be a grocer who always makes you feel better by the time you are checked out. I once heard a speaker talk about the parking lot attendant at a local establishment; living in a major urban city, he will drive past two other stores of the same franchise just to interact with this parking lot attendant. Why? Because they bring passion to their job, and their job becomes a sacred kind of “holy.”
Some of these people have jobs that would impress us — jobs of influence and intense specialization and high salaries.
And yet, some of these people work incredibly menial jobs and have a similar impact on the world around them.
It is true we have been created with certain gifts and are wired to be good at particular things. It is true some jobs align with those gifts better than others and that some situations are suffocating and stifling the life that burns within us. But we are not created for a particular career. We are created to be a particular kind of person. Our careers are simply the place where we can let those things grow.
In this conversation, Mike Rowe speaks against this common idea of “following your passion.” I think Mike might say this idea falls squarely in the realm of the less mature, pre-conventional wisdom. He suggests passion is not something you follow, but instead something you bring with you.
One of the things we are intentionally working on at Impact Campus Ministries is the art of sacred vocation. We have a fundamental belief that all work is holy and sacred. There is a sanctity to a vocation that is often overlooked. Why is vocation holy and sacred? Because vocation is, in its essence, about the proper ordering and stewarding of God’s creation. For centuries, Christian theology has unintentionally (I hope) pulled apart soil and spirit, giving the impression that the “Kingdom work” is done by clergy and missionaries, while the rest of the parishioners essentially make money to help the real work happen. They rub shoulders with the unsaved at their places of employment. They bring the money and “the lost” to the conversation and the holy folks do the spiritual work.
But this is not grounded in good theology. God is putting the whole world back together, bringing shalom to the physical chaos of creation. What this means is that the real work is done by those people who have their hands in the soil (literally or otherwise). It is the job of the clergy to help others see why their work matters. The non-clergy folks are actually engaging in the ends and not the means to that end. It’s all holy and spiritual work, but the clergy are engaging in the means to the Kingdom end — we usually have it backward!
This is so important in the conversation Rowe begins above, and yet one of the hardest ideas to grasp is where the passion lies. For many, the conversation about sacred vocation revolves around the idea that they must find the perfect vocation where their true passion lies.
But as Rowe points out, this is backward thinking.
Passion does not lie in the content of the vocation; passion describes the way we engage vocation in the first place. I think some of us go through life looking for the thing in our future that will give us passion when that passion is already within us and would transform the way we engage with our present.
One of the values at ICM is passion. We use this word to talk about the energy we bring to our pursuit of God. In this case, it is fitting that Rowe’s point is we bring passion to our work. In the same way passion describes the energy we bring to our pursuit of God, passion also describes the energy we bring to our vocation.
We have all met people who remind us of Les (from Mike’s video). They aren’t driven by their circumstances but bring a passion that affects the circumstances around them. It might be a grocer who always makes you feel better by the time you are checked out. I once heard a speaker talk about the parking lot attendant at a local establishment; living in a major urban city, he will drive past two other stores of the same franchise just to interact with this parking lot attendant. Why? Because they bring passion to their job, and their job becomes a sacred kind of “holy.”
Some of these people have jobs that would impress us — jobs of influence and intense specialization and high salaries.
And yet, some of these people work incredibly menial jobs and have a similar impact on the world around them.
It is true we have been created with certain gifts and are wired to be good at particular things. It is true some jobs align with those gifts better than others and that some situations are suffocating and stifling the life that burns within us. But we are not created for a particular career. We are created to be a particular kind of person. Our careers are simply the place where we can let those things grow.
7.29.2019
No Such Thing as a Bad Job
Note: It may be helpful to read my introduction to this series in order to have some context and understand my disclaimers. You can find that post here.
This is a great conversation to follow our last post where we talked some about persevering in the face of rejection. In this video, Rowe shares more stories about his youth and what he learned about work. His point in this video is that every job is an opportunity to be shaped and to learn. This is good wisdom, rarely spoken of or promoted as worthwhile.
And yet, I know many of my students would struggle with exactly how to apply this truth. Do you just say yes to every opportunity that comes your way? Usually not. Especially as life begins to progress and take off, you will be given more and more opportunities; and in fact, saying no to things will be the bigger challenge. There are some chapters in life where you are not given multiple opportunities. You feel like you aren’t being given any shots, and you take the first thing that comes along. Yes, this happens as well. Life is full of complexity and just about every experience you can imagine. We aren’t talking about formulas, but general principles and conventional wisdom.
What do you do when you graduate with your degree, and you are looking for that career? I know many, many students who are paralyzed by the fear of screwing their life up at that moment. Young adults at this age are crippled by the choices, often believing if they make the wrong decision in these moments, they will drastically change the trajectory of their life.
This may be true. But that is what life is about, and you have no other options — except, of course, to do nothing.
We do the best with what we have; we make the best decisions we can. What I see most of my students doing is trying to remove all uncertainty from the equation before they move forward. This is foolishness — the opposite of wisdom. All of life is a calculation of high/low risk, high/low reward situations. You make the best choices you can with the best conventional wisdom you can muster. You make the decision, and you move forward.
As much as I might have tried to convince myself otherwise, I have never made a life decision with a complete absence of uncertainty. There is always the unknown. Sometimes I have made decisions where I felt 90% confident (and I’ve been wrong about some of those, by the way). I often make decisions about things that I feel 75% sure about. And sometimes life has thrown me situations where I needed to make a decision immediately, or in the near future, and I made decisions I felt only 50.1% sure about (in non-mathematical terms, an “I have no idea, but I’m just barely leaning this way” decision). This is a part of life and a part of moving forward. It is necessary.
We will make mistakes; we will judge things wrongly. We will make honest mistakes, and we will make mistakes where we certainly knew better and chose wrongly anyway. This is all a part of life.
And every chapter we walk into will provide us with an opportunity to learn and be shaped by our circumstances. The moment after we make these decisions, it is no longer about the decision, but about the way we respond to the circumstances. What we learn, what we take with us, the way we will be different because of this chapter. These are the things that matter.
So press on and make decisions. Know that you will probably have to do things you hate and go through periods where you don't have “the right fit” and struggle to find yourself. This is a normal part of the human experience in the modern world. Resist the existential crisis and push on to the good stuff that will go with you into the “next.”
This is a great conversation to follow our last post where we talked some about persevering in the face of rejection. In this video, Rowe shares more stories about his youth and what he learned about work. His point in this video is that every job is an opportunity to be shaped and to learn. This is good wisdom, rarely spoken of or promoted as worthwhile.
And yet, I know many of my students would struggle with exactly how to apply this truth. Do you just say yes to every opportunity that comes your way? Usually not. Especially as life begins to progress and take off, you will be given more and more opportunities; and in fact, saying no to things will be the bigger challenge. There are some chapters in life where you are not given multiple opportunities. You feel like you aren’t being given any shots, and you take the first thing that comes along. Yes, this happens as well. Life is full of complexity and just about every experience you can imagine. We aren’t talking about formulas, but general principles and conventional wisdom.
What do you do when you graduate with your degree, and you are looking for that career? I know many, many students who are paralyzed by the fear of screwing their life up at that moment. Young adults at this age are crippled by the choices, often believing if they make the wrong decision in these moments, they will drastically change the trajectory of their life.
This may be true. But that is what life is about, and you have no other options — except, of course, to do nothing.
We do the best with what we have; we make the best decisions we can. What I see most of my students doing is trying to remove all uncertainty from the equation before they move forward. This is foolishness — the opposite of wisdom. All of life is a calculation of high/low risk, high/low reward situations. You make the best choices you can with the best conventional wisdom you can muster. You make the decision, and you move forward.
As much as I might have tried to convince myself otherwise, I have never made a life decision with a complete absence of uncertainty. There is always the unknown. Sometimes I have made decisions where I felt 90% confident (and I’ve been wrong about some of those, by the way). I often make decisions about things that I feel 75% sure about. And sometimes life has thrown me situations where I needed to make a decision immediately, or in the near future, and I made decisions I felt only 50.1% sure about (in non-mathematical terms, an “I have no idea, but I’m just barely leaning this way” decision). This is a part of life and a part of moving forward. It is necessary.
We will make mistakes; we will judge things wrongly. We will make honest mistakes, and we will make mistakes where we certainly knew better and chose wrongly anyway. This is all a part of life.
And every chapter we walk into will provide us with an opportunity to learn and be shaped by our circumstances. The moment after we make these decisions, it is no longer about the decision, but about the way we respond to the circumstances. What we learn, what we take with us, the way we will be different because of this chapter. These are the things that matter.
So press on and make decisions. Know that you will probably have to do things you hate and go through periods where you don't have “the right fit” and struggle to find yourself. This is a normal part of the human experience in the modern world. Resist the existential crisis and push on to the good stuff that will go with you into the “next.”
7.18.2019
[Maybe] The Best Thing to Ever Happen to You
Note: It may be helpful to read my introduction to this series in order to have some context and understand my disclaimers. You can find that post here.
Rowe took time in this video to share multiple stories of rejection he experienced on the path to his own calling. While I’m not a major fan of the phrase “pursuit of happiness,” I really did appreciate his overall point. But I would like to add something I don’t feel he touched on.
Throughout his story, the obtrusive question I kept thinking about was, “Why did he keep going down this path?” I do not ask that question with an assumption of the negative (“He should have tried something else!”), but rather an assumption of the positive (“Why was he driven to persevere?”). The fact of the matter is that Rowe would have never learned this great life lesson to share with the rest of us if he had not kept going back, again and again. But because he did, he learned a very important lesson about rejection.
I believe some people have an internal awareness of the thing they are made to do. There is this inner voice that tells them they exist to be a part of some idea or create a certain experience. Because of this, they keep getting up and walking down the same road. I do not want to give the impression that I understand the psychology behind this reality; certainly, insecurity rears its ugly head in many different ways for so many of us.
I do know what I have experienced with my students, though. Many of them are very quick to question what we are doing and who we are becoming. Many of us see obstacles and frustrations as signs that we’re not made to do “this” and we change our track. I often feel like every time we do this, we begin to suffer an increasing lack of resilience and rising levels of doubt about ourselves.
This is not to say that obstacles and pushback are not powerful tools to help us make decisions and find the best fit in life, but I want to recognize that there is a tacit awareness, a resonance of the soul, a leading of the Spirit, that wants to guide us to who we are becoming. When we find that thing, we need to run down that path with a resilient commitment to the calling. We need to trust that calling and learn from our mistakes — which is another thing I feel like Rowe didn’t address. He probably learned a great many things from those experiences of rejection. Still, we push on, knowing that if we keep pushing toward the good, we will experience hardship and rejection. And yet, through it all, the relentless pursuit of our calling might just lead us to a place better than we could ever hope or imagine.
Rowe took time in this video to share multiple stories of rejection he experienced on the path to his own calling. While I’m not a major fan of the phrase “pursuit of happiness,” I really did appreciate his overall point. But I would like to add something I don’t feel he touched on.
Throughout his story, the obtrusive question I kept thinking about was, “Why did he keep going down this path?” I do not ask that question with an assumption of the negative (“He should have tried something else!”), but rather an assumption of the positive (“Why was he driven to persevere?”). The fact of the matter is that Rowe would have never learned this great life lesson to share with the rest of us if he had not kept going back, again and again. But because he did, he learned a very important lesson about rejection.
I believe some people have an internal awareness of the thing they are made to do. There is this inner voice that tells them they exist to be a part of some idea or create a certain experience. Because of this, they keep getting up and walking down the same road. I do not want to give the impression that I understand the psychology behind this reality; certainly, insecurity rears its ugly head in many different ways for so many of us.
I do know what I have experienced with my students, though. Many of them are very quick to question what we are doing and who we are becoming. Many of us see obstacles and frustrations as signs that we’re not made to do “this” and we change our track. I often feel like every time we do this, we begin to suffer an increasing lack of resilience and rising levels of doubt about ourselves.
This is not to say that obstacles and pushback are not powerful tools to help us make decisions and find the best fit in life, but I want to recognize that there is a tacit awareness, a resonance of the soul, a leading of the Spirit, that wants to guide us to who we are becoming. When we find that thing, we need to run down that path with a resilient commitment to the calling. We need to trust that calling and learn from our mistakes — which is another thing I feel like Rowe didn’t address. He probably learned a great many things from those experiences of rejection. Still, we push on, knowing that if we keep pushing toward the good, we will experience hardship and rejection. And yet, through it all, the relentless pursuit of our calling might just lead us to a place better than we could ever hope or imagine.
7.08.2019
Values Reflect Gratitude
Note: It may be helpful to read my introduction to this series in order to have some context and understand my disclaimers. You can find that post here.
In this first video Mike Rowe shares, he covers two big ideas that are directly connected in his mind. Those two ideas are gratitude and the trade skills gap. At first, when I watched the video, I couldn’t see how those two ideas were connected. But Rowe connected them with a couple of sentences. We’ll go over those ideas.
GRATITUDE
Rowe’s idea is built upon the premise that an “attitude of gratitude” changes your posture enough in life to affect everything you do and experience.
From a Jewish perspective, this point is spot on. This is practiced within the Jewish tradition by the commitment to say multiple blessings throughout the day, thanking God for all the ways He provides and how we encounter Him in our lives. There are blessings for waking each morning, blessings for food (both before and after you eat), blessings for bowel movements (not kidding!), blessings for Sabbath and rest — most orthodox Jews will tell you that a typical day contains anywhere between 70 and 100 blessings (or more). Just try that exercise; it’s hard to get to 40! A great book for further study here would be One Thousand Gifts by Ann Voskamp.
Beyond the practice of blessing, the rabbis teach that this impacts your perspective. Or is it that your perspective impacts your gratitude? Either way, it is a beautiful circular experiment. The rabbis have spoken at great length about the “good eye” (also known as ayin tovah in the Hebrew) and the “bad eye” (known as ayin ra’ah). To have a good eye is to live with a sense of optimism and hope; it is to see the good in everything and to assume the best in others. The bad eye is connected to a “scarcity mentality” that always assumes the worst and sees the potential danger, never opening up and sharing, never giving others the benefit of the doubt. Our gratitude impacts our eye, and our eye impacts how grateful we are throughout our experience.
Notice what Jesus says about this idea in Matthew 6:
TRADE SKILLS GAP
Now, while I love to float in conceptual clouds and dwell in poetic possibilities, what I loved about Rowe’s work in these videos is how he connected it to very practical application for young adults — the people I work with every day. Rowe’s one statement that just clicked for me was toward the end of the video when he said the following:
But the practical application for young adults entering the world of education is also quite staggering. There will be more discussion on this later, but it is helpful for us to consider as families, parents, teachers, mentors, and churches how this truth comes out in the way we mentor our children.
Are we truly grateful for skilled labor?
Do we encourage vocational trades as great options for young leaders?
Do we actually discourage those decisions, telling them “college” is the only option for a bright future?
And while we’re here, has our lack of gratitude impacted the way we see other people groups who usually engage in these trades on our behalf — groups who are often different from many of us ethnically, economically, and culturally? And what’s up with my pronouns? Why do we talk as if there is an “our behalf” — as if the middle-class, white, suburban experience is the one that matters most?
Good food for thought. May we become more grateful for the lives we are given and aware of the ways our eye — tovah or ra’ah — affects our interactions with others and the futures of our children.
In this first video Mike Rowe shares, he covers two big ideas that are directly connected in his mind. Those two ideas are gratitude and the trade skills gap. At first, when I watched the video, I couldn’t see how those two ideas were connected. But Rowe connected them with a couple of sentences. We’ll go over those ideas.
GRATITUDE
Rowe’s idea is built upon the premise that an “attitude of gratitude” changes your posture enough in life to affect everything you do and experience.
From a Jewish perspective, this point is spot on. This is practiced within the Jewish tradition by the commitment to say multiple blessings throughout the day, thanking God for all the ways He provides and how we encounter Him in our lives. There are blessings for waking each morning, blessings for food (both before and after you eat), blessings for bowel movements (not kidding!), blessings for Sabbath and rest — most orthodox Jews will tell you that a typical day contains anywhere between 70 and 100 blessings (or more). Just try that exercise; it’s hard to get to 40! A great book for further study here would be One Thousand Gifts by Ann Voskamp.
Beyond the practice of blessing, the rabbis teach that this impacts your perspective. Or is it that your perspective impacts your gratitude? Either way, it is a beautiful circular experiment. The rabbis have spoken at great length about the “good eye” (also known as ayin tovah in the Hebrew) and the “bad eye” (known as ayin ra’ah). To have a good eye is to live with a sense of optimism and hope; it is to see the good in everything and to assume the best in others. The bad eye is connected to a “scarcity mentality” that always assumes the worst and sees the potential danger, never opening up and sharing, never giving others the benefit of the doubt. Our gratitude impacts our eye, and our eye impacts how grateful we are throughout our experience.
Notice what Jesus says about this idea in Matthew 6:
“The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are healthy, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!”
TRADE SKILLS GAP
Now, while I love to float in conceptual clouds and dwell in poetic possibilities, what I loved about Rowe’s work in these videos is how he connected it to very practical application for young adults — the people I work with every day. Rowe’s one statement that just clicked for me was toward the end of the video when he said the following:
“The skills gap isn’t a mystery; it’s a reflection of what we value, and what we value is a reflection of what we’re grateful for.”This is a great statement of truth to dwell upon for a bit. Obviously, I’m captivated by how appropriate that statement is for so many things, things well outside the topic of skilled labor. The statement is just resounding with some of that conventional wisdom — I want to consider and ponder how far its truth goes.
But the practical application for young adults entering the world of education is also quite staggering. There will be more discussion on this later, but it is helpful for us to consider as families, parents, teachers, mentors, and churches how this truth comes out in the way we mentor our children.
Are we truly grateful for skilled labor?
Do we encourage vocational trades as great options for young leaders?
Do we actually discourage those decisions, telling them “college” is the only option for a bright future?
And while we’re here, has our lack of gratitude impacted the way we see other people groups who usually engage in these trades on our behalf — groups who are often different from many of us ethnically, economically, and culturally? And what’s up with my pronouns? Why do we talk as if there is an “our behalf” — as if the middle-class, white, suburban experience is the one that matters most?
Good food for thought. May we become more grateful for the lives we are given and aware of the ways our eye — tovah or ra’ah — affects our interactions with others and the futures of our children.
6.27.2019
The Loss of Conventional Wisdom
It has been a while since I have written here. I was waiting for inspiration and the right time to “have something to say” rather than “having to say something.” Those things are radically different.
Well, my inspiration finally came from an unexpected place. This means, as usual, the upcoming series will require a disclaimer since we live in a world that likes to make assumptions rather than give the benefit of the doubt. (Is that another series waiting to be written? Maybe!)
At any rate, I bumped into a series of videos by Mike Rowe. It was promoting a scholarship program funded by an initiative he calls the SWEAT Pledge. The pledge is a written covenant of twelve commitments a person is willing to make, and they “buy” the pledge to hang on their wall with the donations going to a scholarship program. You can read about the program on your own; I am not writing to promote Rowe’s program. Whether you support or not, that’s none of my business.
What struck me was the content of the twelve videos that outlined the commitments contained in the pledge. They were full of what I would call “salt of the earth” conventional wisdom. They are things I desperately want to share and teach college students; they seemed to resonate with the soul of what I want to impart to young adults as a professional campus minister.
Having said that, I was taken aback by the source. Mike Rowe is the creator of Dirty Jobs, but he is also a relatively significant online personality — and not one I typically agree with, particularly when it is addressing political and social issues of the day. I rarely find his voice to be helpful. But in this case, I feel like his videos for the initiative nailed it. I have always been committed to celebrate truth wherever I find it — no matter the source — so I decided to eat some humble pie and share the information. I will be doing that in the posts to come.
But it also caused me to reflect for weeks on why these truths were so powerful for me. And I thought of two things: wisdom and my dad.
First, there is this idea of wisdom. One of my favorite teachers loves to talk about the ideas of pre-conventional, conventional, and post-conventional wisdom. Human beings all experience the idea of pre-conventional wisdom. This is immature wisdom, usually experienced during infancy and childhood. Pre-conventional wisdom would say, “I don’t want to go to bed; I want to stay up all night.” It is not really wisdom at all. It masquerades as wisdom but is really foolishness. Of course, as we grow, we move into an awareness of conventional wisdom, the idea that all human beings need sleep and have to get sleep every night. This is wisdom — standard, straightforward truth. But some will move into post-conventional wisdom. This is wisdom able to look back on conventional wisdom, break down some of the structure, question the assumptions, and move to transcendent wisdom. Perhaps this is the person who becomes even more aware of controlling their sleeping patterns and rather than simply “getting sleep” every night, they are very intentional about the sleep they do get and engage sleep in a whole other way.
While the easy way to see this truth is in our childhood, adulthood, and continued maturity, we often struggle with this development culturally, financially, socially, and spiritually — well into adulthood. I have watched plenty of full-grown adults indulge pre-conventional wisdom at will.
The nature of my job and my desire to be a lifelong learner means that I often find myself dwelling in the realm of academia and study. It is a world filled with wonderful thought and critical engagement of our culture. I eat deconstruction for breakfast. It is a world dripping in self-proclaimed post-conventional wisdom.
And in that space we start to sound (and act) like idiots.
We need to return to good ol’ conventional wisdom. We need to remember the things that are just true, built on common sense, and provide a foundation on which to grow toward healthy critical thinking. This is what I found so refreshing about Rowe’s take on this upcoming generation of young adults: his blue-collar, common-sense work ethic is full of wisdom I struggle to impart to my educated student base. I was drawn to that.
Second, this made me think of my dad. As I watched these videos, I kept thinking, over and over again, “My dad taught me this.” One of the biggest things to strike me as I’ve matured is how thankful I am for what I never realized my dad was giving me. This SWEAT Pledge, created by a communications genius, was common knowledge and daily living for my father. As I have wrestled with these truths in the last weeks, I have also realized how important the little things, the everyday occurrences, are in our family and our parenting. It’s the small, mundane opportunities that teach us things like faithfulness, attitude, and hard work.
I’m so thankful for what faithful parents, mentors, and instructors have taught me through the underestimated acts of character and integrity. It is for these reasons that I introduce this series.
And since we’re talking about wisdom, it might be right to remind ourselves of where wisdom comes from. No matter its form — pre-conventional, conventional, or post-conventional — all wisdom comes from one place. Ultimately, it is not our parents, nor our study and learning, nor Mike Rowe. It is from the very mouth of the LORD. May the words of Proverbs 2 guide our critical thinking along this journey.
Well, my inspiration finally came from an unexpected place. This means, as usual, the upcoming series will require a disclaimer since we live in a world that likes to make assumptions rather than give the benefit of the doubt. (Is that another series waiting to be written? Maybe!)
At any rate, I bumped into a series of videos by Mike Rowe. It was promoting a scholarship program funded by an initiative he calls the SWEAT Pledge. The pledge is a written covenant of twelve commitments a person is willing to make, and they “buy” the pledge to hang on their wall with the donations going to a scholarship program. You can read about the program on your own; I am not writing to promote Rowe’s program. Whether you support or not, that’s none of my business.
What struck me was the content of the twelve videos that outlined the commitments contained in the pledge. They were full of what I would call “salt of the earth” conventional wisdom. They are things I desperately want to share and teach college students; they seemed to resonate with the soul of what I want to impart to young adults as a professional campus minister.
Having said that, I was taken aback by the source. Mike Rowe is the creator of Dirty Jobs, but he is also a relatively significant online personality — and not one I typically agree with, particularly when it is addressing political and social issues of the day. I rarely find his voice to be helpful. But in this case, I feel like his videos for the initiative nailed it. I have always been committed to celebrate truth wherever I find it — no matter the source — so I decided to eat some humble pie and share the information. I will be doing that in the posts to come.
But it also caused me to reflect for weeks on why these truths were so powerful for me. And I thought of two things: wisdom and my dad.
First, there is this idea of wisdom. One of my favorite teachers loves to talk about the ideas of pre-conventional, conventional, and post-conventional wisdom. Human beings all experience the idea of pre-conventional wisdom. This is immature wisdom, usually experienced during infancy and childhood. Pre-conventional wisdom would say, “I don’t want to go to bed; I want to stay up all night.” It is not really wisdom at all. It masquerades as wisdom but is really foolishness. Of course, as we grow, we move into an awareness of conventional wisdom, the idea that all human beings need sleep and have to get sleep every night. This is wisdom — standard, straightforward truth. But some will move into post-conventional wisdom. This is wisdom able to look back on conventional wisdom, break down some of the structure, question the assumptions, and move to transcendent wisdom. Perhaps this is the person who becomes even more aware of controlling their sleeping patterns and rather than simply “getting sleep” every night, they are very intentional about the sleep they do get and engage sleep in a whole other way.
While the easy way to see this truth is in our childhood, adulthood, and continued maturity, we often struggle with this development culturally, financially, socially, and spiritually — well into adulthood. I have watched plenty of full-grown adults indulge pre-conventional wisdom at will.
The nature of my job and my desire to be a lifelong learner means that I often find myself dwelling in the realm of academia and study. It is a world filled with wonderful thought and critical engagement of our culture. I eat deconstruction for breakfast. It is a world dripping in self-proclaimed post-conventional wisdom.
And in that space we start to sound (and act) like idiots.
We need to return to good ol’ conventional wisdom. We need to remember the things that are just true, built on common sense, and provide a foundation on which to grow toward healthy critical thinking. This is what I found so refreshing about Rowe’s take on this upcoming generation of young adults: his blue-collar, common-sense work ethic is full of wisdom I struggle to impart to my educated student base. I was drawn to that.
Second, this made me think of my dad. As I watched these videos, I kept thinking, over and over again, “My dad taught me this.” One of the biggest things to strike me as I’ve matured is how thankful I am for what I never realized my dad was giving me. This SWEAT Pledge, created by a communications genius, was common knowledge and daily living for my father. As I have wrestled with these truths in the last weeks, I have also realized how important the little things, the everyday occurrences, are in our family and our parenting. It’s the small, mundane opportunities that teach us things like faithfulness, attitude, and hard work.
I’m so thankful for what faithful parents, mentors, and instructors have taught me through the underestimated acts of character and integrity. It is for these reasons that I introduce this series.
And since we’re talking about wisdom, it might be right to remind ourselves of where wisdom comes from. No matter its form — pre-conventional, conventional, or post-conventional — all wisdom comes from one place. Ultimately, it is not our parents, nor our study and learning, nor Mike Rowe. It is from the very mouth of the LORD. May the words of Proverbs 2 guide our critical thinking along this journey.
My son, if you accept my words
and store up my commands within you,
turning your ear to wisdom
and applying your heart to understanding—
indeed, if you call out for insight
and cry aloud for understanding,
and if you look for it as for silver
and search for it as for hidden treasure,
then you will understand the fear of the Lord
and find the knowledge of God.
For the Lord gives wisdom;
from his mouth come knowledge and understanding.
He holds success in store for the upright,
he is a shield to those whose walk is blameless,
for he guards the course of the just
and protects the way of his faithful ones.
Then you will understand what is right and just
and fair—every good path.
For wisdom will enter your heart,
and knowledge will be pleasant to your soul.
Discretion will protect you,
and understanding will guard you.
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