When I was about 19 and teaching in Oregon, my friend
Katherine and I used to go visit at the state prisons in Salem. In the Bible
studies and chapel services, we got to know a number of prisoners by name.
Sometimes we’d
speculate about their previous lives. We imagined their stories, even if we had
no plausible information to go on.
One day we
got to talking about a young man we had met at OSCI, the medium-security prison. He
was tall, blond, quiet, and intriguing. I’ll call him David.
For some
reason I thought Katherine and I were both in a speculative mood, and I began
yarning a long story about where David was from, how he fell into a crime that
put him at OSCI, when he came to faith, and how he had one sister, a bit younger,
who was really nice and who faithfully came to visit him.
I made it all
up, and I thought Katherine knew that. I was just having fun.
Later we attended a gathering at a friend's house of probably fifty people to hear a speaker from the prison.
As we ate afterwards, I noticed Katherine in deep conversation with one of the
men. She came over to me. “Hey, I was telling Harold what you told me about
David. Can you remind me, did you say it was his sister that comes to visit
him? Do you know if he has other family support?”
I was so
horrified I could hardly speak. “Katherine! Didn’t you know? I made it all up!”
No. She hadn’t
known.
"But! I thought we were both just imagining! For fun!"
Let’s just
say that some awkward conversations followed.
Here is
something you should know: it is easy to make stuff up.
We who read
and watch and listen tend to be a believing bunch. I’d hate to call us
gullible, heaven forbid, but we tend to take in articles or videos or books and
assume the author or speaker is credible.
Malcolm
Gladwell addresses this in his book Talking With Strangers.
Essentially, we
default to truth, he says. We assume people are telling the truth until we
find out otherwise.
The
alternative, he goes on, is to go through life with deep suspicion of everyone
and their words and motives. That’s an exhausting way to live, sustainable only
if you isolate yourself and remove most of the joy from your life.
The internet
trolls who always comment on anecdotes and interesting stories and photos with “fake!”
and “obviously photoshopped!” don’t add anything of value to the world.
However. A
little bit of suspicion, or at least critical thinking, is good.
I am not
only a taker in of words, but a producer of them. While I am more cautious than I was at 19, I’ve been shocked at how
easy it is to make stuff up and have people take me seriously.
For example,
years ago I wrote about evaluating literature and was trying to sound as
pretentious as literary critics do. So I wrote an airy paragraph about finding
the “thematic juxtapositions” in a piece of writing.
It was so
overdone that I was sure it was obviously concocted out of thin air. But no
less a personage than a well-known Anabaptist internet personality took me
seriously and wanted to know more.
Granted,
that was a long time ago, and he wasn’t very old. But other and older people
also took me seriously.
Then, more
recently, in a blog post about the mommy wars, I wanted to make up an example
of an earnest theory that moms might encounter. What should it be? I needed something
so “out there” that everyone would know it was made up, yet with parallels to
real examples, with “facts” and “expert” and “research.”
The next day that same mom posts a long thoughtful post on Instagram featuring her baby all cuddly in a thick cream-colored knitted blanket, with only his round little face showing. She writes in the caption about how important it is to surround our children with warmth, that this teaches them bonding and comfort, starting in the womb, when they are safe and loved at your core body temperature that God made at the optimal degree where a child’s brain absorbs the greatest sense of security. Half a degree down and they show signs of distress and you know, she just wants to kindly speak out about moms who gauge a baby’s comfort by their own and don’t consider that babies have a much smaller body mass, so they get cold faster, and they don’t have the words to communicate this discomfort. The damage can show up years later in children who always need a security blanket and adults who are nervous and anxious and always pulling sweaters on and off, like women during menopause, or men who pull all the blankets to their side of the bed, trying to recreate the security of the womb. She’s done her research. There’s a connection. She knows about this.
Some people
believed this was actually a thing until they reached a footnote that said I made it all up. If you
were one of them, don’t feel bad. One of my own brilliant daughters thought it
sounded plausible.
If we encounter
someone who sounds like they know what they’re talking about, but it’s all new
to us, we often fear looking stupid if we question them or don’t quite believe
them. What if they look at us like, you didn’t know this?? What if all the
heads in the room swivel our way in shock and amusement? What rock has she been
living under?
You don’t
have to be a scowling, suspicious hermit or an internet troll who takes all the
fun out of unusual stories, but it’s ok to push back just a little bit, to ask
questions, and to verify from other sources.
Gary Chapman’s
theories on the five love languages have permeated every course on family life
and relationships in the Christian world in the last 30 years. You can recite
them all, right? Quality time, physical touch, words of affirmation, and so on.
His basic
premise resonates with most of us, I think: of course we all perceive and
communicate love differently.
How many of us
have stopped to ask: Why only five love languages? Why those five in
particular? Who gave Mr. Chapman the authority to decide how things are?
My sister’s primary
love language is empathy. If you feel with her and tell her so, she is your
friend for life. For me, it’s attention. If you make eye contact and affirm my
existence and value, or if you notice that I need something and try to help me,
I feel more loved than if you gave me a hug and a hundred dollars.
Some of you, at this moment, are taking my sister’s and my love languages and trying to shove them into one
of Chapman's five categories, like a kindergartener trying to fold up a dollar bill
and shove it down the slot in the globe bank in Sunday school, while the class
sings two full rounds of Dropping dropping hear the pennies fall.
“Empathy
would come under words of affirmation," you say. "It’s all about affirming who people are
and what they’re feeling.”
Or maybe not.
Gary Chapman
gets the credit for putting the love languages theory into words and coming up
with five categories. But let’s remember that he probably had six or eight or ten,
to begin with, but then his wife and his editor said, “People are going to get
bogged down. You’ve got to condense these to no more than five.” So he did, and
we’ve taken those five as seriously as the Seven Ordinances ever since.
It’s ok if
you have your own love language. You get to differ from the Original Five, if
you like. Gary Chapman doesn't get to decide about you.
Then, around
the same time that the love languages came along, someone else came up with the
brilliant strategy of improving communication in relationships by using "emotional
word pictures."
If I recall
correctly, I heard both Bill Gothard and Gary Smalley speak on this, in person.
As they elaborated on this brilliant technique, something bubbled in the back
of my brain. “Wait. ‘Emotional word pictures?’ Isn’t that like. . . stories?”
Yes, my
friends. As nearly as I can tell, emotional word pictures are just stories.
Maybe tailored and crafted to fit the moment, but still stories.
See, authors
and speakers get to say whatever they want. They can give new words to old
concepts, shape ideas to fit their agenda, or totally make stuff up out of thin
air.
Why would
they do this? Well, someone who comes up with a great new idea and explains it
well will sell lots of books and get lots of clicks on YouTube. So will someone
who puts a new, intriguing twist on old ideas, or who convinces people that
they are in danger and he/she has the insights to rescue them. Or that they are lacking in some significant way and the YouTube expert can fully supply.
If selling
lots of books is a bad thing, then I have the wrong aspirations. I'm just saying that it’s
always a good idea for readers and watchers to think about what people are
saying and what they might be getting out of it.
You don’t
have to go around scoffing in scornful superior derision at everything you hear
and read and see. But don’t take authors, YouTube personalities,
self-proclaimed experts, or people on TV too seriously either.
Some of us have
great imaginations. We are good at making things up.
It's good to question what we say.
It's good to question what we say.
