Tag Archives: faith

Unknown's avatar

God is Gestaltian

by

There’s a psychological school, theory, or effect (depending on who you talk to) known as Gestalt psychology. Gestalt is a German term meaning “essence or shape of an entity’s complete form.” Pretty heavy stuff.

The basic Gestalt effect is best summarized by the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. There are a lot of different pictures and optical illusions that demonstrate the Gestalt effect. But here’s a relatively good one:

Instead of just seeing three Pacmen and three acute angles when looking at this picture, most people see a white triangle overlapping a black-outlined triangle and three black circles. That’s good ol’ Gestalt working hard.

The Gestalt effect, as a concept that was talked about, originated in the late 19th century. Until then, most people thought that if you studied a thing’s parts, you were studying that thing.

To the modern mind, ingrained with Gestaltian thinking, the idea that people didn’t consider the Gestalt effect seems absurd. I was pondering this absurdity when I remembered the words of Jesus in Matthew 18:20:

 For where two or three come together in my name, there I am with them.

And there it is. The truth of the Gestalt effect right there in the Bible. One person plus one person does not equal two people. It equals two people and God and a dynamic relationship.

Unknown's avatar

Breaking Statistics

by

I have a confession to make. I tend to put a lot of stock in statistics. I think it started in high school when I started applying to colleges. I had never really thought much about statistics before. They had never come up before. But college admissions statistics hit hard.

Some of the places I applied had admission numbers lower than 10%. That felt almost impossible. And then when you factored in the fact that those schools are trying to get a balanced entering class from all over the nation, those numbers decrease. And I bought it. I bought every decimal point and every fraction.

Because here’s the thing about statistics: once you start believing them (even for a second), you start seeing yourself in the other part of the statistic. In my case, I began to see myself in the 90% that didn’t get into the universities I wanted. This was because there are a lot of really talented, awesome, intelligent people out there. And it seemed ludicrous to suggest that I could ever be in the top 10% of them. And maybe because of that line of thinking, or, more likely, because the world sometimes does the whole statistic thing the way you expect it to, I didn’t get in to any of those statistically-challenging universities.

And so now I put a lot of stock in statistics.

My friend was talking to me the other day about this problem he had with something that Jesus once said. It comes in Matthew 22:14. He says, “For many are invited but few are chosen.” I understand that there is a whole discussion we can have here, depending on our individual theologies, about what this verse means. A lot of people have interpreted it a lot of different ways. But when I was explaining to my friend why I didn’t find this verse problematic, I realized something. This verse is about statistics.

Statistics are about how things are or have been. They don’t control the future. And so when Jesus says that many are invited but few are chosen, maybe he’s not saying that he’s picked those people already. Maybe he’s just saying that it’s tough. It’s tough to apply to prestigious colleges. It’s tough to graduate from high school if you are kid growing up in the inner city. It’s tough to follow God. And that’s all that we should believe of the statistics. Because knowing something is tough motivates us. But trying to divide the world into 10% and 90% gets complicated and stupid.

Unknown's avatar

Love is Not a Currency

by

If I ever write a book, I think it’s going to be called Lies People Tell You. Because there are a lot of them, and it would be easy to come up with new chapters.

There’s a lie out there that says we can run out of love.

That’s not true.

Love is not a currency. Let me repeat that: Love is not a currency.

You can’t run out.

I wrote a post about a week ago about reading I Kissed Dating Goodbye. I have one major problem with the book – the assumption that love is a resource we can waste. In the first chapter, Joshua Harris tells this story about a girl’s nightmare. She’s at the altar on her wedding day and as her husband is saying his vows, all of the girls he’s slept with start walking and standing around them. I’m rather sure love has nothing to do with all of this.

I think the reasoning for this kind of fear comes mostly from Proverbs 4:23, which says, “Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring  of life.” Nowhere does this verse say “guard your heart or else you won’t be able to give it to your future spouse.” But that’s how a lot of us read it. And, certainly, sometimes it feels like that’s what’s true. We fall in love for the first time, and when it ends, it feels like we will never be able to love at that level again. That’s all just faulty reasoning, though.

I think we are supposed to guard our hearts because we are special and valuable, not because our hearts and our love are finite. God wants us to share our specialty and value with people who deserve it, people who have earned it. That makes sense to me.

We have been offered everlasting, infinite love. The least we can do is offer that to others.