biblical worldviewing

As someone who’s taken 3 multiple-choice exams in survey-type classes (lecture) in the last week (2 of them today) I have been thinking about methods for taking exams. As I look over my blank red answer form, known as a Scantron, and then thumb through the exam pack, I try to waste no time in sighs but get right down to work. After 10 or so questions, I sometimes think, “whoa, ok–so far I really think I haven’t gotten a thing wrong!” but I make sure to read each question carefully, looking for vital clues which may reveal more probable answers. The obvious clues are always a great joy to spot, such as later question that completely answers a previous question:

18. The founder of The Atomists was:

A. Anaximander
B. Xeno
C. Democritus
D. Aristophanes

32. Democritus believed, according to his Atomist theory:

A. atoms can have different shapes.
B. atoms have no color.
C. atoms are eternal.
D. all of the above.

The statement of question 32 answers the earlier question 18, and if you answered something differently, at this point you’d flip back and change your answer. It’s like a free test question! Sometimes the answer to a previous question comes in the form of a choice for a subsequent question, like ‘B. Democritus and the Atomists’, but this is less reliable because associations may be intentionally mixed to throw off the student for that particular question.

The suggestion of answers based upon information in other questions can sometimes become more confusing than helpful, however. Normally, when I am answering a question I am not entirely certain of, I rule out as many choices as I can. What happens though, when another question comes up that’s on the same subject as the first unsure question, and information in the question suggests you may have been wrong about the first question? You have the choice of either sticking with your first answer and being consistent with your guess, or of changing your guess to correspond to your new guess in the new question. For example (a question I made up–but very well could have been seen on many tests I have taken before):

9. In Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno, Captain Amasa Delano’s character serves as a representative of:

A. European scepticism.
B. naval law; Delano as a judicial/naval etiquette figure at sea where naval code supersede national laws.
C. American shrewdness, capitalism and New-World economics.
D. simple New England innocence.

Suppose even though you’ve read the novel and studied your notes from class, no answer jumps out at you as exactly the answer you studied and had anticipated, but you are torn between 2 or 3 choices. You know that ‘A’ is not the answer, because Delano is an American. ‘B’ and ‘C’ both seem very reasonable, because a case could be made for both of these themes in the novel. At this point, if you’re like me, you might ask yourself something like, ‘this question is so stupid! It’s completely up to interpretation and you could argue that more than one answer is the best. The answer could be different depending on what sense you mean the question–literary? historical? psychological? arrrrgh!!’ After some thought, you decide to go with what you remember from reading the novel, that Delano is from New England, and since that is one of the choices, you think it must be the right answer because it wouldn’t be so specific otherwise. You mark it down and tell yourself you are 70% sure, and carry on.

14. Delano probes Benito Cereno about his seemingly inept method of command on Cereno’s ship, the San Dominick, and makes several comments about his own command aboard the Bachelor’s Delight, emphasizing his stern treatment of insubordination and breach of conduct. Delano wonders if Cereno is not a ‘paper captain’, which is defined by Delano as captains:

A. ‘who own the deed to the ship, but not the respect of the men.’
B. ‘who by policy wink at what by power they cannot put down.’
C. ‘whose naval exploits have been recorded in popular journals of their nation, but may have been elevated too highly.’
D. ‘who traffic in parchment–that hard to come by stuff that America’s most valuable asset, its laws and codes of government, must by means be recoded.’

This question seems to provide some information that could argue for a different answer above! The emphasis on law and naval conduct in question 14 suggests that maybe ‘B’ (B. naval law; Delano as a judicial/naval etiquette figure at sea where naval code supersede national laws) was the right answer in question 9. Suddenly, the 70% sure turns to 60% and falling–to say nothing of how to answer question 14! Could ‘C’ in question 9 correspond with ‘A’ in question 14 due to the economic nature of the content? Or perhaps the two questions are isolated and do not have anything to do with each other.

This is the third alternative: answer both questions as you see fit and do not worry if they both appear to lead in differing directions from one another. If you change the first answer to satisfy the latter (or vice versa), you risk being wrong on both counts. Worrying that you must be wrong because two of your answers don’t seem to match up between two questions (unless it’s a very obvious case that eliminates one of your answers as an option) is like worrying that there are too many ‘C’ answers when you get 5 in a row (I hate it when that happens!)

This man, Joe Carter, writes about a 4-part strategy that will change your life, starting in a most natural place, your mind. How To Change Your Mind could be what all our souls are thirsting for and an answer to hundreds of weeping prayers. What category of person are you, according to Carter? Probably the most convicting and inspiring thing I’ve read in many weeks.

So even though just one month prior, Gareth and I had managed to arrange a last minute pickup-truck rental with 4 other people and head to Austin for our 3 days leave from our summer camp employer in Texas, nothing was coming together for our fabled trip to Mexico for this month’s furlough. It would mark almost 10 weeks of work for Gareth and I at this camp that neither of us were too content with. The Austin trip was kind of a prelude to this one–a warm up. We had discussed busing to Austin and taking it in by foot, sleeping under the stars outside of the city limits, but instead we rented a pickup with some other people and ended up sleeping in some glamorous townhouse and then a hotel room with a bunch of other friends from camp (although, I actually slept in the bed of the truck parked right in front of the Texas capital building at the request of my fiancee who did not want me to even sleep on the floor of a crowded hotel room that contained two strange girls–she was right). In any case, the first trip was too posh and we were interested in a real adventure this time around. We wanted to go to Mexico.

There we were, just like two sailors on 3 day leave, and not about to let this trip disappoint us. The problem was, everything seemed to conspire against us going. We didn’t want anyone else coming with us–we felt like there weren’t too many people among the staff who would be as good natured about going on the kind of trip we had in mind. Most of the other staff were looking for binge drinking and all night parties. Besides, we were best friends there. Since there were only two of us, the cost of renting a car was too inhibiting. My next immediate idea? Motorbikes. Or rather, a single motorbike. I had figured out the Mexican border was a mere 160 miles away. I looked through local ads for anyone selling a motorbike real cheaply in the week before the trip, planning to purchase it, ride it down to Mexico with Gareth, and try to sell it again before the end of the summer. If only! When that fell through, I started to think if we could just get regular bikes, we could ride to the border. I then realized that if we only had 3 and a half day’s leave, we could make it TO Mexico on bicycles, just not back. Even though I had borrowed plenty of people’s cars that summer, and even though I coveted the beat up old trucks the Mexican groundskeeping staff drove around camp, the ones with no windshield or holes through the floor, I knew that they, nor anyone else, would not let me borrow their vehicle for a few days. It’s not fun being in a remote place with no public transportation and no car–especially if you’re used to having one. Even if we wanted to catch the Greyhound bus, we’d have to bum a ride from someone to town 15 miles away.

Our time off, every single minute of it, was precious to us. As camp counselors, we had to work long days being constantly vigilant, even being ‘on duty’ while sleeping. When time off was given, it was not to be wasted. The kids had left after the end of the second session, we had all received our months’ wages, and the clock was ticking. We had asked someone for a ride to town, to the bus depot, but that was all we had been able to pull together in preparation for our trip.
‘Gareth! Here we go, get your stuff together,’ I remember saying.
‘Umm, right, you see we don’t even know what we’re going to do once we get into town,’ I remember hearing.
‘What does it matter? Anywhere is better than here. If we don’t make it further than town, well we can camp there and walk back here when it’s time to come back. Trust me on this one Gareth, please man, I promise you won’t regret it,’ were my actual words.
‘Ok.’

We had a small backpack each (Gareth opted not even to bring a change of clothes, and decided to wear the same thing three days straight) as we climbed into the camp van heading to town with some of the other staff who were going in just to buy beer. They knew our ambitions, but they thought we must be joking, since we had no real plan. The first leg of the trip was off to a bad start–there weren’t enough seats in the van so we were crouched in the back, on top of their laundry bags. It was hot, and there were heavy delays due to construction on the only rural route to town. Spirits were low. Upon arriving in town, I tried to recall as best as I could where the bus station was, but we drove up and down the street I thought it was on twice, and didn’t see it. I then told the other guys driving to just drop us off right there and we would find it by walking, because I knew it was really close. As we got out, the guys were saying things like ‘good luck’ and ‘if you don’t make it back we’ll know you’re dead’. We stopped at the Wallgreen’s and Gareth bought some cigars (for later), and I bought some crackers to augment my small stash of snacks for traveling in my backpack. Along with that, I had a 32 oz water bottle about half full of water. We asked where the bus station was, and were told it was about 6 blocks away, so we started walking. Spirits were getting higher, despite the heat. I think we passed a little building that said ‘Krystal’s Kustom Styles’ and looked like a salon, and I said it was a front for the Klan and they dropped the third ‘K’ because it would be way too obvious. If anyone from New Zealand deserved to be in America, walking around in small town Texas on a trip to the border, laughing at Klan-related humor, it was Gareth. It’s not like he was super infatuated with American culture, although he was keenly conscious of America’s number one export to his own land. More than that, it was his love of American music. Gareth goes by the title of ’sound engineer’ by virtue of a trade-school course that taught him how to run soundboards and more for bands. He is an aspiring jazz bassist, and gets so much of his inspiration from artists that most Americans (even myself) are woefully ignorant about. Every once in a while, Gareth would point and say, ‘Can you believe it? (Insert iconic American folk-star here) wrote a song about this street.’ ‘Who?’ said I. He was always singing something or other to himself, and when ever I knew it, I would join in. We got to the bus depot and it was exactly as I remembered it from the day I rode in to that small town 2 months earlier, wearing clean clothes and idealistic about my summer in Texas. The only person there was a bum snoozing on the bench. When we came up and saw the doors shut and the hours posted ‘9-4, Monday-Thursday’, the hobo spoke up and told us the next bus was San Antonio, 8:30 pm, $17. It was about 5 pm then; how could we possibly wait around and waste precious hours at the bus station and making no progress to Mexico?

‘Seventeen dollars? I’d rather walk.’ It didn’t matter who said it, it was said. We decided that even if we never made it to Mexico, walking the 60 miles to San Antonio along a very lightly-traveled highway through Texas countryside, and setting off as the sun was going down was tempting enough to satiate our desire for adventure. Keep in mind, we had been through two months of strict dutiful schedule-keeping and subordination for small pay and with small interruption–we wanted to be free and for both of us that meant risk. So we started walking. We stopped and ate some crackers and Gareth bought a round of cokes. Gareth and I had by this time established a gentleman’s agreement about buying cokes and fast-food meals: each one would try to out-buy the other and constantly offer to buy each time. With both of us trying to always buy for the other, it always made it just about even–it was the thought that counted. We were leaving the town and getting on less and less ‘walking friendly’ streets. We were discussing things like music, God, the Bible, our relationships and camp and barely noticed we had come to the highway. Here we were faced with a dramatic change in the tone of our trip. Up to this point, nothing we had done could rightly be termed ‘crazy’ or even ‘highly unusual’. We had only strolled around town with backpacks on. Now we were about to start walking on the highway–a thing of which I was dubious as to the legality and safety, but (more for Gareth’s sake, who had never been to America before, and because I didn’t want to dash our dreams on the asphalt of the on-ramp and turn back) I hushed my trepidation and pretended like nothing at all was wrong with walking up the on-ramp and onto the highway to San An. Spirits were high.

They say it and it’s true: the sky is bigger in Texas. It was a gorgeous July late afternoon and the sun was still yellow and sky was still blue even though it was almost 6. This part of the world is called ‘Hill Country’ because, unlike most other parts of Texas, there are rolling hills that are mostly craggy, but enough of them are green and leafy for people to think they are in Georgia or something. It’s appeal lies in the fact that it looks less like Texas than the rest of Texas. It was beautiful though, and we walked on the side of this highway crossing bridges over rivers and valleys, and walked as the road cut through bluffs then followed stretches of rolling pasture. There were things you could call vistas, and we weren’t sorry at all that we chose this manner. For the first hour, we took turns holding out our thumbs (it actually gets really tiring to your hand muscles to stick out your thumb for long periods of time) mainly because we did want to get to Mexico, and because we were curious to see if anyone would really pick us up. Heck, we thought, we would pick us up! However, after a while we gave up thumbing because it made us downhearted that people could be so self-centered and drive by two perfectly good-natured guys like us. ‘We’ll just walk like we don’t want to get picked up, and if anyone wants to help us, they will. It will be all the more encouraging if they do that way!’ It was getting on 7 pm, and the signs were telling us the next town was 20 miles or more. Gareth kept on saying things like, ‘You know they say the Roman centurion would march an average of 25 miles a day en route to battle. That was considered pretty standard.’ Our water supply (half of my water-bottle) was all we had and it didn’t seem like enough. With every step the thought kept coming to me, ‘yessir, we are totally set for any event out here. We could walk as far as we want, or just settle right here on that hill and camp for the night. We’re sitting pretty; all but for one thing–that darn water. We could manage all night, only our throats would be pretty dry in the morning. Oh but besides that, everything is going great!’

More on the way…

Lately I’ve been engulfed with feelings of failure and spiritual lethargy. I keep on picturing the last year or so in my life and my tendency is to chart my different seasons of mountain and valley experiences as well, mountains and vallies on a linear graph of sanctification. I look to the time I was in Asia in 2005 as a Mt. Everest of mountains, with a line of holiness and desire for God sloping downward with the occasional rise of a season of closeness with the Lord here and there. I tell myself again and again that there is no sin or no pattern of bad attitude that cannot be nipped in the bud with true repentance and reliance upon the Lord, and there is no such thing as a graph that plots out sanctification–because Jesus is the one at work, and not all these circumstances and slumps of my emotional life. The Lord is surely orchestrating everything in my life in ways that are more complex than a graph in 19 dimensions, and here I am trying to peg out a 2-dimensional graph of how the Spirit of the Lord ’seems’ to be resting upon me.
Yet that is how it feels from ‘the limited confines of my bus drivin seat’, to use a Cademon’s lyric. I look at mountains in the past and just ‘feel’ I am not in them right now and I long for the times when I was. I want to reproduce them somehow. Of course, I know this is foolishness, and it strikes to the heart of the issue of authenticity of experience. One class I had challenged me to draw a picture of how the Trinity works–how Father, Son and Spirit exist independently and together, and how they incorporate believers into their divine fellowship. Spend a few minutes trying to represent that in a drawing. It shows the absurdity of trying to estimate your spiritual barometer using the finite, subjective means we have. His grace is sufficient to the day thereof.