Posts from the ‘Thoughts’ Category

Those Days When You Feel Like The Little Mermaid

I love our language teacher. I love how she teaches, what she teaches, and I feel like our time together is worth it. Lately she’s even been helping my language abilities by engaging me in philosophical and controversial conversations. We’ve gone over the war in Iraq, abortion, same-sex marriages, and other hot topics.

Today she brought up how she doesn’t think it’s right for parents to prohibit bad behavior for fear that it will put the idea in their children’s minds to do it. She said one of her friends worked in a private Christian school and shared with her that the kids who attended that school were worse than those in regular schools. She said kids there did things they shouldn’t because they were told they couldn’t. On the other hand, kids who were never told not to do something, didn’t. She asked if my mom ever told me I wasn’t allowed to kill others. When I answered in the affirmative she asked, “Why? Did your mom think you were going to kill people if she didn’t tell you that? And if you would have killed people, would that have stopped you?”

Though her view has a hint of logic, it most certainly falls apart under only a little bit of scrutiny. The first thing that comes to mind is simply how whether you say something out loud or you don’t, you’re still saying something. Every reaction, every look, every gasp communicates how you feel about the world, and children can form their worldview based on those tiny expressions alone. Just because she never told her son not to kill doesn’t mean the idea wasn’t expressed in her family.

Secondly, this argument must answer the question of absolute truth. Who says killing is wrong in the first place? Who says it’s not normal to kill someone? Modern society? What if my society thinks your society is wrong? And of course we could have talked about the nature of human beings in general, and how without any sort of expressed standards of morality we would have a big mess on our hands.

And since I had some of these thoughts, I told her, “No…I think…not…God says…Bible…parents…anyway…yes…no…understand?” Okay, so I was probably a little more coherent than that, but I was so frustrated at not being able to communicate my thoughts. I had them, but I couldn’t share them.

From personal experience, I know that when someone doesn’t communicate well, we tend to—not intentionally, mind you—think that the person is not very intelligent. It’s the difference between, “I want go eat food, yes?” versus “Hey, let’s go grab a bite to eat.” I’ve often found myself caught off guard when I hear a foreigner who doesn’t speak English well talk with someone who speaks his same language. All of a sudden, even though I can’t understand them, they sound like they do in fact know something. They sound like an adult and not like a child.

Here, I often have to remind myself that I do actually know a language, and know it well. Sometimes during these serious conversations I just want to shout, “I know things! I have a voice! I’m not an idiot!” And this feeling is further exacerbated when the discussion has to do with eternally important things: If only I could tell you what God says about that. If only you could understand how much God has done for you. If only you could understand how and why sin separates us from Him.

So I left my language class a little depressed. I was down because I realized that no matter how long I live here, I will never be able to speak Russian like a Russian. Even if I continue to progress and learn to speak very well, I will never have a command of another language like I do my native English. Having that thought made me feel trapped. It made me feel like no matter what I do here, my voice will always be stifled. Like in order to be here I had to give up my voice. Poor unfortunate soul.

But as I prayed some I started thinking about about what my teammate David brought up this last Sunday when we met together. As we discussed and prayed about our new church plant effort, he said that we could really relate to what Paul said about the beginning of his relationship with the church in Corinth:

When I came to you, I did not come with eloquence or human wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. I came to you in weakness with great fear and trembling. My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power (1st Cor. 1:1-5).

Every word in that passage is talking to me. I most definitely do not have eloquent speech, and because of my speaking ability it is very difficult to appear like I have any sort of wisdom. I suppose that all this frustrates me so badly because I feel like I have something to offer, that I have wisdom to share. But Paul reminds me that it’s not about me, my wisdom, or my eloquence, it’s about God’s power. And because what I communicate won’t be with wise or persuasive words, I can know that the faith of the people here will rest on God’s power, not mine. And that’s a good thing.

This is good news for every one of us. We don’t need to worry about knowing all the right things to say, we just need to proclaim Jesus Christ and him crucified. We need to know that while we may be scared to death and our voice may be trembling as we share with someone what Jesus did for this world, it is actually during these times that faith in God is put in its right place. I wish I could speak the language here as fluently as a native, but I can’t, and so now I will sit back and watch God’s power be made perfect in my weakness. And I would invite every one of you to try and do the same.

Language Acquisition: Sprinkling or Immersion?

They say the best way to learn a language is through immersion training. That is, go and live among the people who speak the language you want to learn and you will pick it up faster than you ever could in the classroom. The idea is when you are surrounded by a foreign language, you are forced to learn it to survive. I don’t disagree. But I have to tell you, I’m having a hard time getting fully immersed.

I’ve been a little discouraged with the progression of my Russian skills. I’ve done a lot of thinking as to why that is because it seems, at first glance, we’re doing all we can. Katie and I are very satisfied with our Russian teacher, and I feel like I’m learning a lot from our time together. Our Russian lessons are an hour long, four days a week. On the days we’re not in class, we spend two or three hours doing homework and studying on our own. Add to that the different group events we attend each week and it feels like we’re spending a lot of time studying the language. When I really think about it, though, if we’re talking about immersion training, we’re not even getting our hair wet.

On an average day I’m awake for about sixteen hours. I spend most of these hours with my wife who, incidentally, speaks English. It is also not uncommon for us to spend several hours in a day with some or all of our English-speaking teammates. Even when we do have events that include Ukrainians, our team usually outnumbers the Russian speakers so, inevitably, some of us will be speaking with each other in English while others are having conversations with the Ukrainians. Oh, and I almost forgot to mention that most events with Ukrainians include a good percentage who want to use the English they already know so we end up speaking in English anyway. Out of the sixteen hours I’m awake, then, I’d say on a good day I’d be lucky to get six hours of quality Russian language exposure. Six out of sixteen is 37.5%. If I told you I went swimming but explained I only went in to my knees, you would tell me that it wasn’t swimming. And you’d be right.

If you don’t use it, you lose it. But it’s not that it’s lost so much as put away somewhere in your brain and hard to retrieve on command. The problem isn’t that I’m not learning anything, it’s that I’m not using what I’m learning enough. I learn new words every day, but until I start using them for myself they’re not going to stick. The key to changing all this is exposure. I need my days to be filled with more Russian than English. If I’m hearing and using more English than Russian, English will stay at the front of my brain and Russian will continue to be a struggle to pull out. My theory is until I can get my Russian exposure to at least 51% of the hours in my day, I’m not going to see an adequate progression. It’ll continue to be three steps forward, two steps back. Progress, yes, but only in surviving, not in thriving.

You wouldn’t have thought that finding opportunities to use Russian would be so difficult seeing we live in a Russian speaking culture and all, but it’s not easy. Sure we use it frequently when asking how much something costs, or even telling people where we’re from, but this is Russian 101 and stuff I’ve known since 2002. It’s time to move forward. How to do that, however, is the hard part. Language lessons are only a piece of the puzzle. It’s the getting out there and using it that brings the new language to the front of your brain and keeps it there.

I’m 28 and married now, and what I mean by that is I’m not a single, 19-year-old American boy primarily working with kids anymore. My job as an AIM student back in 2002 made it easy to be around Russian speakers because kids thought it was cool to hang out with us. Plus, they didn’t have jobs so they were free most of the time. Nineteen-year-old hanging out in the courtyard with the kids who come to Bible class: acceptable (possibly even if cool). Married twenty-eight-year-old hanging out with neighborhood kids outside: creepy (possibly prosecutable). People our age have jobs and more often than not, children, which makes spending casual hang out time nearly impossible. College students are an option, but they are usually quite busy with their studies and if they are available they are the ones who want to practice their English. We even asked our Russian teacher if she could think of groups or clubs or something we could do that would allow us to talk to more people. Since everything would be in the context of us being foreigners who speak English, she couldn’t think of anything.

All of that was to say that if I, at the stage of life I’m in, want to really learn to speak Russian as close to fluently as possible, I have to be very intentional about increasing my exposure to it. Lately I’ve been trying to watch more Russian TV and I’ve loaded some of my old Russian music onto my iPhone so that even when I’m not conversing, I’m still hearing it. It’s a step in the right direction, but it still leaves so much more to be desired. Call me crazy, but I’m getting really close to the point of paying someone to hang out with me. However that just feels so unnecessary given my current geographical location. Maybe it’s not.

I know some of this will improve over time as we get to know more people here, but what bothers me is that right now is the time we’ve devoted to studying Russian, and so I’d like to take advantage of that now. Somehow I’ve got to figure out a way to get to 51%. I want to be immersed in Russian, not sprinkled. Maybe it’s the church of Christ kid in me, but sprinkling just doesn’t feel right.

Stuff I’m Learning: Ministers and Social Security

I have been absolutely amazed at all there is to learn about ministers, missionaries, and taxes. I feel like every day I learn (or re-learn) something new. It is amazing how hard it can be to do this work with integrity, as so much of this stuff is just begging to be swept under the rug and labeled “Not So Important.”

One such matter that has really surprised me is the subject of ministers opting out of Social Security. Ministers are one of a very select few who can easily say they don’t want to participate in Social Security. The simple reasoning behind it is that if you feel like being a part of Social Security goes against what you believe, and you work as a minister (a job entirely based on your faith), you may opt-out.

Katie and I recently spoke to a tax professional who works solely with ministers and missionaries on their taxes. As he was explaining all the ways he could help us while we were overseas he casually mentioned something along the lines of, “And if you decide to opt out of Social Security…” I stopped him right there because I’ve known for years about all the talk of this opt-out, but I’d never really talked with someone about it, especially not someone who did this for a living.

But Why Opt Out?

I asked my questions and he explained that the opt-out could be an excellent way for a minister to save for retirement. The idea is, you put all your money that you would be paying for Social Security into your own retirement account (like a Roth IRA) and when you finally do decide to retire you’ll be making a whole lot more money than you would have simply from drawing on Social Security.

This idea sounded intriguing, and as a Millennial who knows that Social Security is becoming more and more insecure as the years go on, and realizing that there’s a fair chance it won’t even be around by the time I hit retirement, it seemed much wiser to use that money the way I saw fit. “But can’t you only opt out if you declare it’s against your conscience to pay the taxes?” I asked. (In light of Paul telling us to pay our taxes in Romans 13:7, there was no way I could say it was against my conscience to pay.) He informed me that the principle ministers were operating on was that of being a “good steward” with the blessings God had given us. I certainly could understand this one; giving away all that money and seeing such a teeny tiny rate of return was definitely not the best way I could use the blessings God has given us.

The idea was sounding more and more appealing to me. When we spoke to others who recommended we not opt out, the unanimous advice given was that we simply would not be able to keep up with the payments throughout all those years (there would always be something that would come up) and by the time we hit 65 we wouldn’t be getting anywhere near what we had intended to. Also we would be opting out of Medicare which is a huge blessing to many retirees. These were fair points for sure, but Katie and I are both diligent people who do what we set our minds to (at 27 years of age, before children, and while we hold a steady ministry job at the moment).

But What Does The Law Actually Say?

As we were feeling genuinely confused but leaning more toward opting out (which can only be done once and causes quite the headache if you ever want to opt back in), we talked with some friends who reminded us to do something: read the opt-out agreement. So I did. And here it is, IRS Form 4361 (emphases mine):

I certify that I am conscientiously opposed to, or because of my religious principles I am opposed to, the acceptance (for services I perform as a minister, member of a religious order not under a vow of poverty, or a Christian Science practitioner) of any public insurance that makes payments in the event of death, disability, old age, or retirement; or that makes payments toward the cost of, or provides services for, medical care. (Public insurance includes insurance systems established by the Social Security Act.)

Let me paraphrase that: “I certify that I am conscientiously opposed to the acceptance of any public insurance.”

So the problem with this agreement is that I’m not. I’m not opposed to the government giving me as much money as they want to. Suddenly, the term “Christian tax professional” doesn’t mean as much to me. There is nothing in my Bible that says my conscience should object to receiving government help. Turns out that this whole opt out thing based on the principle of being a good steward with my money doesn’t hold water. Form 4361 is about being morally opposed to participating in this social program and thereby refusing to receive money from said program.

But Now I’m Really Confused

And so even though I now move forward having made my decision with a clear conscience, I am also more confused than when I started. How in the world is it that so many Christian ministers and missionaries are signing this form when I know that they can’t believe what they’re telling the government they do? The tax man we talked with said that most younger ministers today are choosing to opt out and are doing it based on the stewardship principle. Really? My sincerest hope is that these men are being misled to sign this form and are not truly understanding what they’re vowing to the government. My greatest fear, however, is that they have read the opt-out agreement and are simply doing it to save money and are sacrificing their integrity for the sake of the dollar.

This post wasn’t about you, by the way, and so I hope you won’t take it personally. I’m not trying to single anyone out with this article. I’m just eager to share what I have been learning and to point out what seems to be a grave misunderstanding in our church world today.

Because of the subject matter and the highly controversial topic this is for so many, I’ve decided not to allow comments on this post. I do not want anyone to feel obligated to share their opposing view, and I don’t want to allow a place for those who agree with me to do so without compassion. This isn’t to say that I don’t want to hear from you. There are a lot of godly men that I know who have opted out of Social Security. I want to hear from you, please tell me if I’ve missed something. Is it really not this black and white? I honestly want to learn more about this. If you don’t have my email address, you can let me know using the contact form.

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For further reading on the subject, here are a few links:

“Opting Out of Social Security” by Crown Financial Ministries (an excellent website)
“12 Key Legal and Tax Issues” by NewMinister.com
A blog post by Justin Taylor
A blog post by Russel Moore
A blog post by Jay Guin

We Won’t Be Seeing “Dinner For Schmucks” Either

I am just getting so tired of it, you know? From the very first trailer we saw for it months ago, Steve Carell’s new comedy Dinner For Schmucks looked absolutely hilarious. It truly looked like a genuine comedy, funny because it’s funny and not funny because it’s full of shocking, revolting sexual humor. And because nothing in the trailers seemed to indicate it being filthy (as they typically do), Katie and I had been making plans to go see the movie on opening day.

However, as we do for all our movies now, we checked Plugged In Online (read more about the site here) before we headed off. Turns out, it is just like almost every other comedy coming out today: full of sexual vulgarity. No I don’t mean a few innuendos, I mean saturated with exaggerated sexual humor designed to make you laugh because of how uncomfortable you are, simultaneously introducing images and situations to your mind that you never would have had up there otherwise.

So as for me and my house, we will not allow ourselves to put this movie into our minds, a place where dialogue, images and situations can be recorded for a lifetime.

Check out the Plugged In review for the movie here.