Living in Who I Am

I really should try to get my blog posts done in the morning. I had several ideas — and the words — before lunch time, but other things to do. The afternoon was spent at the oral surgeon’s (my mother’s surgery/extraction is set for Wednesday morning), helping my mother with her rehab exercises and then walking Quigley. Then there was dinner and coming up with an estimate of next year’s medical expenditures (and here I’ve been writing about the fallacy of trying to predict things; admittedly just estimating the costs of the same things I’ll use next year that I used this year isn’t really “predicting”) and now I feel mentally incapable of doing much more than setting down this list of activities.

One thing I have been doing though, is contemplating the central point of recent lessons, ie, who I am in Christ. What He’s made me to be. Righteous. Royal. An Ambassador. In union with the creator of the universe.  Perhaps I’ve already blogged about this, but can it be repeated too often? Part of that contemplation extends to my tendency to live my list of things to do.  I know I’ve mentioned that before — where my thinking becomes consumed with the list of activities I have to do, and no matter what I’m doing, I’m thinking about how I have to hurry and get done so I can do the next thing. All the while intimidating myself with warnings of the — usually unspecified — disasters that will befall me should I fail to get everything done.

Well, that’s all guilt and fear and bondage, when that’s not at all why Jesus died for me. Not to live like that, but to live in freedom. I’m already perfect in His sight. Nothing I do will change that. It won’t make me better, it won’t make me worse. So… what difference does it make what I get done today? Really. What difference? If I do absolutely nothing He’ll still conform me to the image of His son.

So I’ve been stopping myself from the list thing, and turning my focus onto who I am, as I said. Instead of the dreaded list, my tasks have changed into activities the Lord has selected for me to do for His glory and also for my benefit. And often for my pleasure, if I’ll just slow down and realize it.

As I’ve said before, the important thing isn’t to get things done, it’s to live for my Lord and Savior. To stay in fellowship, to live in the peace that Christ died for me to have. Everything the Lord leads me to do has purpose. And all the worries about the things that didn’t get done, can be laid right back on Him. And He has promised to provide everything I need.

“Sing praises to our God on the lyre, who covers the heavens with clouds, who provides rain for the earth, who makes grass to grow on the mountains. He gives the beast his food… He does not delight in the strength of the horse; He does not take pleasure in the legs of man (running about doing stuff). The Lord favors those who respect Him, those who wait for his lovingkindness (grace) ”  ~Psalm 147:7-11

Top Down Planning vs Tinkering

Okay, last post I got so carried away with one direction that Black Swan author Nassim Taleb took me with his recommendation that we adjust to the existence of Black Swan events rather than try to predict them, that I never got around to relaying how he suggested we do this adjusting.

He’s big on “anti-knowledge,” that is, what we don’t know is actually more important than what we do know. Which is ironic given how much people value knowing stuff. (This fits into the spiritual life as well… what we don’t know about God is surely more important than what we do, since we’ll be learning about Him for the rest of eternity). So if focusing on what you don’t know is the key, how does he suggest we do this?

“Among many other benefits, you can set yourself up to collect serendipitous Black Swans (of the positive kind) by maximizing your exposure to them…[C]ontrary to social-science wisdom, almost no discovery, no technologies of note, came from design and planning — they were just Black Swans. The strategy for the discoverers and entrepreneurs is to rely less on top-down planning and focus on maximum tinkering and recognizing opportunities when they present themselves…”

Aha! Perfect justification for my lack of “top-down planning” when writing a book. It’s the random stuff, the stuff you can’t predict, the things your subconscious brings out that interest you that you had no idea were interesting that make the book itself interesting. At least I think so. And if you don’t know you think something is interesting, how are you going to plan it out? So this whole line of thinking, which I don’t feel like I’ve really set down clearly, lets me see more clearly why doing it the way I’ve been doing it isn’t such a bad thing after all.

I need to tinker, recognize the good bits when they come, and also, he says at some other point in the book, have plenty of down time to think and play and just be mindless if I need to.

Not that I’ve had any time to do anything remotely like tinkering when it comes to the next book, but when the current season of events in my life comes to a close and I get back to writing, I’ll be ready.

Adjusting to the Unpredictable

One of the things that has so intrigued me about reading The Black Swan is that it seems like each new section brings up another thought-provoking idea that leaps off the page at me. Yes! I think. That IS how it is.

Or, No, wonder I was having problems with such and such. Or… Wow what a fantastic doctrinal analogy!

As I’m going back through earlier sections which I’ve already read, I’m finding nearly every page dog-eared. Just in the prologue, I came upon the notion that instead of trying to predict Black Swan events (seeing as they are, by definition, unpredictable) we should instead be seeking to adjust to their existence.

That thought alone triggered a rush of thoughts. How do you adjust to the unpredictable? You adjust to the Justice of God, to use a phrase often uttered by my pastor. You adjust to His justice first through salvation, and second through consistently being filled with the Spirit and growing in knowledge of His word. Because of Christ’s work on the cross, the Father’s justice has been satisfied and is therefore free to bless us when we believe in and appropriate that work for ourselves. He gives us His own righteousness and places us in union with His Beloved Son, and as a result we share everything His son has. (Meditate on that concept for a little bit!)

The more we learn, the more our thinking is changed to His, increasing our  capacity to receive the blessings He wants to give us. He is for us. He decreed everything that would ever happen to us, and it all fits into His purpose.

Whatever happens may not be predictable from my view, but to God, who is outside of time, it’s already happened. Just like the fact that from my side He’s conforming me to the image of His son even now, whereas from His I’m already conformed.

If you can really get your mind around those facts and live in them, there’s not much that can unsettle you. So then Black Swan’s don’t really matter. Because to God there are no Black Swans. What I love about this book is the crack it’s putting into the facade the world throws up — a facade that people know things, that things are getting better, that we have control, that there are experts and the rest of us better listen to them, that we can have security and safety and surety…

When really, who could have predicted 911? When the cold war ended, who could have predicted that the next big threat was going to be muslim extremists operating out of primitive villages in the Hindu Kush?

I couldn’t predict that when I took my mother to the dentist the other day to get her cleared before taking a drug her oncologist wants her to take, that they would going to find decay in one of her teeth and tell us she needs to have it pulled. My mother is nearly 82 and has excellent teeth. Only two tiny cavities and those having appeared only in the last few years. Yet here she is with decay hiding between two of her back teeth.

Nor could I have predicted I’d lock myself out of the house yesterday morning, but that happened too. Nor that today, when I was hanging out the laundry, a sock would drop and Quigley would pounce on it (he hasn’t done that in over a year I think) and I’d spend the next ten minutes chasing him to a standstill so I could get it back. Neither incident remotely measures up to the immensity of a Black Swan event, but in my life at least, they serve to illustrate that you really never know how things are going to come together to completely change the day. Or maybe the week, or month or even the rest of one’s life.

 

Quote: Predicting Poorly, Unawares

The inability to predict outliers (events which lie outside the realm of regular expectations) implies the inability to predict the course of history, given the share of these events in the dynamics of events.

But we act as though we are able to predict historical events, or, even worse, as if we are able to change the course of history. We produce thirty year projections of social security deficits and oil prices without realizing that we cannot even predict these for next summer — our cumulative prediction errors for political and economic events are so monstrous that every time I look at the empirical record I have to pinch myself  to verify I am not dreaming. What is surprising is not the magnitude of our forecast errors, but our absence of awareness of it…

Our inability to predict in environments subjected to the Black Swan, coupled with a general lack of the awareness of this state of affairs, means that certain professionals, while believing they are experts, are in fact not. Based on their empirical record, they do not know more about their subject matter than the general population, but they are much better at narrating — or worse, at smoking you with complicated mathematical models. They are also more likely to wear a tie.

From the Prologue of  The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

The Illusion of Predicting

One of the things The Black Swan, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, points out is the delusion we have that we can predict the future. We have all these formulae, formal and otherwise, that we use to do so… Having been involved in stock trading (he was a risk analyst and advisor) Taleb uses that background along with a strong interest in philosophy and science to dissect and consider all the ways we have of assuring ourselves that the world is steady, even and subject to our interpretation and prediction. If we want to avoid some disaster or to bring about some happy result, we have only to follow the recommended course of action, and voila. There we have it.

Not.

In Taleb’s view the world is far more random than most people will admit. I think to some degree this is a product of business, travel, civilization where you have all these organizations of people interwoven. My editors need to estimate how many copies my next book will sell so they will know how many to print, and much paper, etc, to have on hand to do so. They want me to predict how long it will take me so they can get the cover artist started at the appropriate time, get the book in the appropriate catalogue and start the appropriate marketing plan at the right time for the release of the book. Today’s competitive market demands that you begin marketing before the book is out.

In fact, today’s competitive marketing depends a lot on predictions — only one firm will be the one to make the killing on the next celebrity, best-seller, popular technical advance, demand for xyz that no one saw coming. It’s the reason news agencies break stories before reporters have all the facts, hoping to be the one with the scoop. So it’s very important to those in the marketplace to predict the future, to figure out why things happen as they do and then try to emulate those things…

The trouble is, says Taleb, the illusion that all this planning works, is really… well, an illusion. There is more luck involved than anyone wants to admit.

Of course what he calls “random” and “luck,” I see as the sovereignty of God, so it was gratifying, a day or so after I started the book to open my Bible randomly to Isaiah 41:21 where I read:

“Present your case,” the Lord says. “Bring forward your strong (arguments),” the King of Jacob says. Let them bring forth and declare to us what is going to take place; as for the former events, declare what the were, that we may consider them, and know their outcome; or announce to us what is coming. Declare the things that are going to come afterward, that we may know that you are gods; indeed, do good or evil, that we may anxiously look about us and fear together. Behold you are of no account, and your work amounts to nothing; he who chooses you is an abomination.”

“Declare to us what is going to take place… that we may know that you are gods.”

And of course there is this one, too:

“Come now, you who say “Today or tomorrow, we shall go to such and such a city, and spend a year there and engage in business and make a profit.” Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow (let alone a year from now). You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away. Instead, you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we shall live and also do this or that.” James 4:13-15

And yet, the culture we live in asks us to do the opposite.

The Black Swan

I first became aware of the existence of The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb when my son put it on his Christmas list (last year? the year before?) and I bought it for him. Looking through it casually (the subtitle is “The Impact of the Highly Improbable”) I knew I eventually wanted to read it. Recently my son brought it with him on one of his trips home and told me that he was finished with it for the moment and I could read it. I stuck it on the shelf to await my attention once I’d finished various other books I was involved with.

Recently, finished with One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, I stood in front of my bookshelf in preparation for going to the Y (where I needed a new book to read while I rode the stationary bike) and asked the Lord what I should read next.

Should I start my own Guardian King books as a dear friend recommended I do (I have never read any of my books in entirety since they’ve been published) or something else? The Lord drew my eye to The Black Swan sitting at eye level between Builders of the Ancient World and One Door Away from Heaven. I asked again, specifically, should I read Guardian King or Black Swan? He prompted me to pull Swan off the shelf and open it to the place where I’d left off when Adam had first given it to me (on the first page), where I read, “[the sighting of the first black swan] illustrates a severe limitation to our learning from observations or experience and the fragility of our (human) knowledge. One single observation can invalidate a general statement derived from millennia of confirmatory sightings of millions of white swans. All you need is one single black bird.”

 I was immediately pulled in: “First, it [the black swan] is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.”

 Is this not a perfect description of the first advent? And the second? Nothing in the world points to it, only the Word of God.

 The writer goes on…”A small number of Black Swans explain almost everything in our world, from the success of ideas and religions, to the dynamics of historical events, to elements of our own personal lives…”

 I continued reading, riveted, knowing that there was much here about perception, belief, human bias and our almost total inability to predict the future even though many of our authorities claim to be able to so, all of it showing just how much of a deception the cosmic system really is, and how much more reliable is the word of God. The writer’s premise is that we think we know far more than we do (about the world and life and events) when, in fact, we really know very little… and this fits so into the whole framework of deception… which God has recently pointed out to me as being the “Thing” that I’m to write about (and have been writing about all along) that I knew this would be the next book I’d read.

So I took it with me to the Y and as I mentioned here, I have not been disappointed. I’ve dog-eared page after page and have taken to writing about thoughts generated from reading it in a spiral notebook. It has opened my eyes to so many things — not only with regard to how the cosmic system (of thinking) works, but also why we are so vulnerable to it.

 Naturally, I’ll be blogging more on the subject in the next few days.

Quote Of Note: Con Men and the Gullible

“Con men understand that their job is not to use facts to convince skeptics but to use words to help the gullible to believe what they want to believe.

“No message has been more welcomed by the gullible, in countries around the world, than the promise of something for nothing. 

 ~Thomas Sowell

(From his September 11, 2009  National Review Online article “Charlatan-in-Chief“)

His Plans Not Mine

Last night’s message in the GBC Basics Class that is going through the book of John triggered some tremendously clarifying thoughts for me. We’ve reached verses 15-17 of chapter 7 where the Jews were marveling at our Lord’s teachings, wondering how He could speak with such authority and confidence when He’d never gone to Rabbi or Pharisee college. Jesus’s answer:

“My teaching is not Mine, but His who sent Me.”

Now, He was not teaching the same stuff as the other rabbis and pharisees, yet they all claimed the same source for their messages. In fact, Jesus’s message was pretty much opposite what the Pharisees were saying (keep the law and you’ll please God and be saved vs believe in Me and you’ll be saved) Naturally the Jews wondered how they could know who was telling the truth? Jesus said,

“If any man is willing (ie, determined) to do His (the Father’s) will, he shall know of the truth, whether it is of God or whether I speak from Myself.”

Pastor Joe, the pastor in training who teaches the Basics classes, said that the student who makes the word alone his absolute standard and doesn’t tolerate nonsense derived from human minds will know it’s from God. If you keep at it and keep taking in the Word from your prepared Pastor on a daily basis, God will, through that, give you the ability to see the success of the Word when it’s applied to life and circumstances. We see its success in the fact that we have inner peace in a situation that formerly would have reduced us to, as my friend Mary likes to say, a trembling puddle on the floor.

That’s true. I have experienced that. When I gave the deadline and the publicizing of my books over to God to handle, I experienced great inner peace. But as I listened to the lesson and recalled this, I still had some doubts. Forgetting about the inner peace, I recalled that I’d trusted Him with the success of The Enclave. Trusted Him to be my publicist, to build the readership apart from social networking and the help of man which would encourage me to compromise my beliefs.

Yes, I experienced the peace that came with slamming all my cares on Him, but in the other matters it seems that He didn’t come through. My books aren’t apparently huge sellers, I’m not getting a bunch of fan letters and in fact, The Enclave is rated only 4 stars at Amazon, the lowest of any of my books. So… what’s up with that? I trusted Him and this is how He came through?

Ah, but as I thought through that sequence during the class, reminding the Lord that I’d trusted Him to build the readership, etc, the Holy Spirit seemed to say, “Well… who’s to say He hasn’t done that? Maybe He didn’t do it on as great a scale as you had hoped, but He’s still done it…”

True.  And if it’s not as much as I’d dreamed of, well, there’s a reason. More than one. First, being wildly successful would be a distraction to my spiritual life. It would probably have consumed me, I would have thought I had done something to earn it, and wouldn’t have had to go to Him again and again like I have because everything would have been going “right.”  I certainly would not be making the applications of doctrine that I am right now. In fact, now that I think about it… I wasn’t trusting Him with my cares so much as I was trusting Him with MY plan. Seeing that things weren’t going as I’d hoped, fearing that the book would be no good, that I’d lose readers, that… blah, blah, blah… I couldn’t write and so I gave it over to Him to fix. But it was still MY plan.

Which is hardly the way it’s supposed work. I’m supposed to be trusting Him for HIS plan, whatever it may be. MY plans are stupid and small. Earthly. Temporal. His are way beyond anything I can imagine. Nothing so small and temporal and petty as the acclaim of a fallen world, but plans for my eternal benefit, plans to give me what money can’t buy and very few enjoy. Worldly acclaim can’t compare to unshakable inner peace, joy, love… confidence that His word works, that no matter what He is with me, that He will never leave me nor forsake me… That I am who I am by His grace, and who cares if people don’t like that? Confidence that there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

But what about all the people watching — those who read of my decision not to do things the world’s way, and who haven’t seen Him come through for me? Won’t it look to them like He didn’t? Maybe. Will they think to themselves, “Oh, see? She should have banded together with us, trusted us to bring her success. That’s the way it’s supposed to be done.”

But why should I care? Am I serving man or God? And anyway, who decided that worldly success is the mark of God’s coming through? Those, I would guess, who aren’t willing to trust God with their plans and would rather take a shot at fulfilling them themselves.

Phone Book Exercise

Last week as part of our rehab exercises, my mother was supposed to stand upright while holding on to her walker, lift her foot and place it on a phone book. This was an exercise that was supposed to strengthen her leg and help her bend her knee more. Unfortunately, she kept lifting her hip with her leg straight in her attempt to put her foot on the book, and I had to keep reminding her to bend her knee. “The point of this exercise isn’t so you can just put your foot on a book, it’s to practice bending your knee,” I told her.

As I did, it occurred to me how often God does that same sort of thing in our lives. He brings in problems that, taking the superficial view, have an obvious external, temporal purpose and goal: straighten out the medication mix up, nurse the person back to health, complete the book, get the school project done, get the car fixed after it’s broken down… But just like with my mother’s phone book exercise, none of those are the real goal.

The real goal is eternal — God conforming us to the image of His son, bringing us to a point where we can share in his sufferings and experience a bit of His resurrection life in time. And the problems and screwball events in our lives are often just exercises that bring us along toward that eternal goal. As Pastor Joe said in Bible class tonight, God is in the details of our lives. If He numbers the very hairs on our heads, He knows all about the other small things of our lives, and uses them to accomplish His purposes for us.

A Few Small Brushstrokes

Yesterday I wrote a bit about my mother’s resistance to being rehabilitated, which perhaps had caused her therapists to see her in a light not entirely accurate. Because, for all her resistance and fears and stated distrust, in the end she’s done pretty much everything they’ve suggested she do, and even a lot of the things I’ve suggested she do. (She’s even gone into the pool twice now and has decided she likes that part best of any of it!)

Then today, God provided her that bit of validation of her effort and suffering I had hoped for yesterday, as we both suddenly realized that she can now pull her foot directly under her knee when she sits in a chair, something she had not previously been able to do. She also noted she’d had a much easier time getting into the car when we went to her radiation appointment than she’s had in a long while. So clearly there’s been progress, and progress she can feel.

Even better, the physical therapist responded to an email I’d  sent him Sunday night regarding her continuing inability to move her leg though she is trying hard. He said he’s thinking now that the radiation treatments she’s been getting might be causing her muscle weakness (that muscle is right next to the bone that’s being irradiated). He wanted to know what kind of radiation they’re treating her with and her radiation oncologist is going to contact him directly about it. So it looks like they’re dropping the “you’re not trying hard enough” line and moving on to other methods of treatment.(Thank you, Lord! Amazing how He can turn things around with just a few small strokes of His brush.)

Not to say the path is clear ahead of us, just that for today we both had a bit of a respite and things look much brighter than they did on Thursday night.