Turning My Brain Off

Michelle and the kids finally got home last night. Every year, Michelle takes them down to her moms to spend the week there. The last few years this has not affected me too much, as I would be in China. However this year, I “had to fend for myself” for a week. It’s amazing how much I just turn off in my head when she is around. I’ll give you a few examples.

Grocery Store

Friday I went to the grocery store to get food for the week. Let me caveat that by saying I pretty much knew I had my weekend and week full for dinners and lunches, because I was going to be eating out with others to discuss business or hangout with college students. But for some reason, come Friday afternoon, I felt like I needed to go to the grocery store. Once I get there, it’s like I draw blank:

“What do I buy? I know I need to eat but what do I eat? Michelle cooks. What does she cook? I don’t cook. I grill. What would I grill? STEAK! Oh, wait I need jetski oil. I can do that! I have done that before. Jetski oil, steaks….. what else?”

By the time it was all said and done, I had spent almost as much as what Michelle would spend in a month for all of us! By the way, I haven’t eaten half of it.

Boat Safety

That evening, I took my jetskis out on the lake to do a test for in the morning. I had some teens planning to ride them, and I wanted to make sure they were riding ok before in the morning. I back the skis down into the water, and notice a LOT of gas floating on the surface. My initial thought was that someone previously had just emptied out their boat before loading it on to their trailer. As a jetski owner, this should have triggered an alarm, an alarm that normally would have been present with my wife and kids around….

I climb on top of one of the skis and begin to try to start the jetski. All of the sudden, a huge detonation comes out of the hull of the ski! This explosion blew the front lid open, shooting the storage compartment 3 feet up in the air! At the same time, a fire ball comes out of from under the seat singing the hairs on my legs. Turns out the gas floating in the lake was from my ski. It had a gas leak, and thanks to the ridiculously hot weather recently, there was a massive amount of gas fumes under the seat, waiting to be ignited.

Cleaning

On the way home on Sunday, our realtor called saying she had a showing. I get home and start looking around for floor cleaner. Turns out, glass cleaner does NOT clean ceramic floor tile! Where does all “that stuff” come from that I sweep off the hardwood floors? It’s only been me here for a few days! How does Michelle arrange the pillows on our bed so they look so “Ethan Allen” like? Do I leave lights on or off? Closet doors open or closed?

Cooking

I finally got around to cooking pizza. Slightly more conscious of my lack of attentiveness to certain tasks, I read the directions for the frozen pizza, and followed it to tee! I was so excited: preheat oven to 450 degrees. Check. Unwrap pizza from box. Already did that. Set on middle rack. We only have 2! Uh…. I’ll set it on the top and hope for the best. I come back in exactly 11 minutes, and the pizza is looking awesome. It’s got that brownish color to it that I love so much. I open the door, reach my hand into the oven, and am a milli second away from grabbing the thing WITH MY BARE HANDS, when a little voice in my head says, “hot.” It doesn’t scream at me like,” HEY! Idiot! Stop before you burn your fingers off!” It very politely and calmly says, “hot.” Thankfully, I listened.

These are only a few examples of how my brain seems to turn off when Michelle is around. There were others, like looking for Q-tips, pillows to sleep on, ceiling fan noise, door for the mailbox, etc. that I am not going to get into. The experience really showed how much I just seemed to have turned over to her. I wonder if she has similar experiences like these?

Liars

This summer, Michelle and I have been teaching a series to our college group on relationships. We have a great group of young adults that are mixed together from backgrounds such as financial, social, spiritual, and also personal maturity. Its been an absolute blessing to spend time with them. Not only do we teach them, but they teach us as well.

Sunday night one of them was scheduled to teach, but a lesson that I started in the morning went long, and we decided to carry it over. I talked about lying. Specifically, I played a clip from Radio Lab, titled "Deception". Its a documentary about lying, pathological liars, and the science behind lying. The clip that I played was about a con-woman who had gotten into the life of a friend of the producer. The phrase that I focused on was, "...and he has never had any close friends since...."

Think about that for a minute....

Imagine that where you are in this world right now, you would not ever develop a new intimate relationship! The only "serious" relationships you will have, are those that you presently have, for the rest of your life! As you can imagine this didn't sit very well with early 20s. They have their entire life ahead of them! And that was the point: Don't lie!

I know you might find this hard to believe, but I come across a little, let's say, harsh periodically. I have been called blunt. Emotionless. Unsympathetic. Its very rare that those that know me ask me how their new hairdos look. My reason for this, is that I do everything I can to not lie to people. And what amazes me sometimes is how difficult it is! Some people just don't want to be told the truth. They have an answer in their head, and that is what they want to hear. When they don't hear "that", they get their feelings hurt. And what I find absolutely fascinating is that something as simple as an opinion about a dress can have SERIOUS ramifications later! But the truth is, I am no different. As blunt and honest as I am, I also find myself asking people opinions when I already have the answer in my head.

On the other side of the coin, we don't want to hurt peoples' feelings. As one of our young adults mentioned Sunday night,"I understand I am not telling the ACTUAL truth, but it is just a white lie, and I don't want to hurt their feelings." And its that type of perception that is completely misunderstood. The effects of lying on a relationship are sum totals of many lies. The more lies I tell, the more you don't trust me. I keep telling you over and over that, "you look great in that dress", and eventually you catch me one time. You aren't impacted by that one lie! All the rest come with it!

My own personal opinion is that lying has its roots somewhere with the fear of confrontation. I am definitely no psychologist, but that seems to be rather obvious. "If I can get out of this immediate situation, then maybe I can regroup later to defend my actions!" Or more than likely, I will avoid you like the plague from now on, because I don't want to to talk about this particular topic!

Towards the end of the radiolab podcast, the hosts interview a guy who studies lying. He gives the "professional definition of lying", talks about how bluffing in poker is not lying, due to the fact that all competitors know that part of the game is bluffing, and he also talked about a fascinating experiment he did a few years back: He didn't lie for an entire year!

Imagine that for a minute.

"Honey, do I look fat in this dress?"
"Do you like my hair cut?"
"Would you like to come over? I am having a party tonight."
"What did you think of my presentation?"

In this year, as he put it, he learned how to speak eloquently so as to do the least harm on some one's feelings. The cliffnotes version is: avoid answering directly, but be honest. It is actually possible to answer someone without hurting their feelings. You have to KNOW them. By that, I mean you have to have a pretty good idea of how they will react to the news. He talks about how difficult it was to choose his words carefully. He says it was literally exhausting sometimes.

And that is my point: its easier to lie. If we just tell them what they want to hear, they won't be disappointed.

But is that really true?

If we just go over for a few minutes, be fashionably late, speak to 5 people, agree on the hand signals with the spouse to get us out of there, and then politely leave after the 2nd person who leaves, then they will be happy when they talk to us about their party on Monday. Even though we never wanted to go in the first place.

If we invite 40 people into our home when it can only accommodate 20, because some of those 20 have relationships with a select few that we don't want to associate with, but if they found out about our party and were not invited they would have their feelings hurt. So, we over invite people with the thought that they will be in our home and we may not actually have to speak to them because there are so many people at our party!

Whew! Its exhausting!

I think we just need to be honest. We need to spend some energy and choose our words carefully. We also need to NOT have high expectations of what we want to hear. It goes both ways. Again, relationships are two way streets. Let's treat them that way.

* Differences

Yet another piece of data in the differences in my children...

All those who have traveled with children in the backseat know that at times the noise from that small square footage can seem more than you can take. Sometimes I loose my cool, others I can ignore it, sometimes I fall in the middle. My favorite technique is to turn up the volume on the radio. This works 99.5% of the time.

Yesterday I turned up the volume with little success so I went for step two, turning it up more. This succeeded in quieting my son but NOT my daughter. So I went to step three, turning it more again. The music quite loud now and should be getting my point across. I look in the rear view mirror and she is doing a 'disco' style dance move and head banging. The mix of styles is unfortunate but the fact that my technique was completely ineffective really stunk.

Sigh.

Just another example of how the teenage years will go for me. (Not her dad of course who is PITIFUL and the one in this family she can manipulate in milliseconds)

* Rich

Let us all assume that you have seen the list of questions designed to point out how rich we are. I have clothes on my back, a roof over my head and food in the refrigerator. Which makes me richer than 75% of the world. Owning a computer make me one of the top 1%. By definition if you are reading this - you also have a computer and are as rich as I am. The statistics are interesting, yet rarely motivating. Sad really. Apparently most of us need to literally be hit in the head with a 2x4 to feel anything.

Yesterday the kids and I traveled over to the inner city church for lunch, which our college ministry serves weekly through the summer. I have said before how glad I am to have an active service outlet for my family and particularly my children. I try not to stress over numbers and that is good since yesterday we fed three teenagers, along with our selves. Not the largest crowd. I flippantly said we were focusing on quality not quantity that day. That flip remark turned out to be true. For over an hour I stood in a basement kitchen talking with three of our under privileged youth in this city. They were helpful and tolerant of my differences. I was the one out of place. They were at home and comfortable.

Admittedly I am older than is 'cool' and amazingly out of touch. Instead of trying to be something I am not I honestly admit I know nothing. They found my lack of coolness entertaining and spent fifteen minutes scrolling through the music on their phones to find something I had heard. They finally found one. During this process I also was introduced to a song by Mary Mary called 'God in Me' which I really liked. I promised to go home and listen to more. During this time another adult walked through the room and within a minute alienated all three of those teens. He probably thought he was meeting 'today's underprivileged.' I have no doubt he does good things, but that minute wasn't one of them. In his attitude he angered rather than endeared them. When he left they turned to me and asked if I liked him. I could only honestly say I did not know him well. It was interesting to see the response and it comforted me to know I wasn't failing miserably.

Let's bring those threads together now. (money and honesty fo rthose who weren't follow the 'threads') A few minutes later the teens and I joined the minister and one of our college students for a great discussion in the basement nursery about church and community etc.. During that discussion one of the girls asked me if I was rich. I immediately backed off and said a safe thing like I was rich compared to the rest of the world. We talked a little about how America overall is richer than billions of people. That was not satisfying to her. She asked again and I took a deep breathe and said,

"Yes I am rich"

(That is hard to say since we seem trained to always compare ourselves to those with more, but truly the statistic of being in the top 1% is true)

Her response "Then you are one of those good rich people"

In an emotional moment I could have cried. She spoke honestly with me and appreciated my honesty in return. To her I am drippingly rich. I know some one who once showed the average income by zip code. My church building sits in a zip code of over 100000 average income per year. (three times that of our state) The inner city church building sits in a zip code of less than one fourth of that. The difference between our resources are vast.

What do I do with my richness? Lament the fact that I am wealthy since Christ said it would be hard to get into to heaven? I do not think that is the answer, although stuff and money often get in our way to seeking God and His kingdom. I think the answer to being rich is same as the solution to many situations. Honesty. Admitting what we have and that it belongs to God Himself. I should not back away from the reality of what I have, it doesn't help me and it doesn't help those I see in the inner city. I watched as honesty was more effective than good intentions. I didn't like admitting I didn't know their music or that I had way more than they did. But pushing them away would be worse.

There are so many people I know with tons more money than I have. Their bank account has a lot more zeros at the end. Their houses are bigger and nicer and have pools and theater rooms and custom cabinetry.

However looking up at the rest of the 1% is not the true picture. I need to be honest with myself and not back away from the fact that I am rich. (And you my friends on the computer are too)