Knowing What You Think About Things

When I was in middle school, I had this neighborhood friend who was a couple years younger than me.  She had a sister who was only a year older than me, but she might as well have been ten years older than me for all we had in common.  I was a reader too, but I liked to spend boring Summer afternoons playing cards and running around the neighborhood.  I’m pretty sure she never left the house.

This girl, just by being who she was, always made me feel stupid and immature.  There was at least a short period of time when we would walk home from the bus stop together and I wouldn’t say anything and she would not stay quiet.  I remember her asking me what I thought of something once, and I didn’t really have an answer.  She pushed the issue, and I said, “I guess I’m just not that opinionated.”  She backed off then and said that her problem was that she was too opinionated, which meant she was wrong a lot and would rush too quickly to judgment.

At the time, everything just seemed too gray to me to ever declare anything one way or the other.  And there was so much I didn’t know or understand, so reaching conclusions felt premature.  The world was so vast and complicated, I would have guessed I’d always feel too overwhelmed by it all to make sense of any of it.

It took me a long time, but I’m surprised now by the things I know.  Not just the facts I’ve learned, but the things I believe to be true.  I’m always accompanied by doubt and I use every qualifier available, but I find myself in situations now where I know what I think about things and I trust that.  I’m an intuitive thinker, which means I get feelings about things.  I try to add evidence to these feelings, but usually that’s secondary.  I’ve always been this way, but it took me time to develop my thinking and learn to trust it.

Even people who have known me forever don’t believe me when I say this, but I am so much smarter than I used to be.  Again, not just in my awareness of facts, but in how I think.  I still think intuitively.  I still base most of my decisions and opinions on feelings, but those feelings have been shaped by my experiences and, more than anything else, my education.  This is why I’m frustrated by people who think college is just about what the piece of paper you get at the end will mean for you in the job market.  College completely changed me.  If I’d never been challenged in so many ways, I would be a different person now.  It continues to shape me, because every day as a student, I am confronted with a huge number of ideas, most of them things I’ve never considered before.

Religion can either attract or repel people who need certainty, but the study of theology is probably better suited for people who can deal with uncertainty.  We spend hours talking about and years writing about questions that do not have answers.  It’s speculative.  I mean, how am I really going to know if God was present in Jesus on the cross or why bad things happen to good people or, the most speculative of them all, what happens after death?  When I first started studying theology, I was so overwhelmed by all the questions that I felt like I didn’t know anything.  But, somehow you start putting things together, and you have to take this piece out here and move this one over there and sometimes it all crashes down, so you start over but not from scratch this time.

Sometimes I am surprised by the things I know.  On the night of the health care reform vote, I was reading thoughts  all over the internet, and I was about to tweet something to the effect of, “Sometimes I have a hard deciphering between opinions that are ignorant and those that are just different from mine.”  But, then I thought, “No, I don’t.” It was pretty easy to tell the difference. I just didn’t want to accept there could be such ignorance so close to me.

Knowing what you think about things has a lot to do with becoming comfortable with who you are.  I knew things back then, too, but I wasn’t comfortable enough to take a stand if it might mean admitting later that I was wrong. There are people in my life who use a lack of knowledge as a reason to remain indifferent and apathetic to things that affect them more than they know.  There is risk involved with saying what you think.  There is risk, too, in remaining silent, but it’s passive and hides itself well.

Living actively requires saying what you think and acting on that knowledge.  Intellectual honesty requires changing your mind often and articulating that change.  It never gets easy, because what you think is at the heart of who you are, but when you accept the risk and put it out there, it’s amazing what you get back.