Sundial Syndrome

I spent the afternoon with some 2nd graders who are struggling with some math concepts. We spent our time working with Judy clocks. Some of you may remember theses wooden geared clocks where the movement of the minute hand automatically shifts the movement of the hour hand and vice versa. Among the half a dozen students who are pulled out for special help in this area are ones who cannot concentrate, ones who are confused, children who struggle in this specific area of academia, students who struggle in all areas of learning, and ones who disrupt the larger class.

As I work  with the children and the clock I keep thinking of something that the teacher mentioned. None of them can practice this skill at home because there are no analog clocks in their homes. It makes sense, as I take stock of the clocks in our own home: 

• Three digital alarm clocks, 
• several digital watches,
•  various digital readouts on appliances, thermostats, and computers, 
• oh yes, a binary clock on display in the living room. 
• The only thing that comes close to an analog clock is an art piece I have in the basement shop. It is a clock,  but there are no hands, instead a large marked gear rotates under a pointer allowing time to be read. 

My house would not come close to helping these students read a classroom clock. Analog clocks are disappearing from our world slowly. There are still mantelpiece clocks, decorative wall clocks, grandfather clocks and such, but they are often more decorative than functional. Put a grown man, or woman in a room with an analog clock and there is a high probability that they will consult their digital wristwatch for the time. Put a child in their place and there is no hesitation.

I really do understand why analog time is still taught. Mathematically it strengthens concepts of time, skip counting, rounding (almost 7 o'clock), etc. And it will be many years until analog clocks go the way of the  sundial. I totally understand reasons to teach analog time. 

But I also find myself in a situation where I am questioning it. Many of the students I am sitting with are still struggling with basic addition. A few cannot count past 100. These students might benefit from dropping analog time for the moment and concentrating on skills where there aren't other options in later life. 

I fully realize that this is not the teacher's fault - they have little choice in what gets taught when and for how long. I also realize that many adults would fight against the removal of any skill that has become a traditional part of the grade-school curriculum. Many would fight even though they now use a calculator to figure out 6 x 7 and they never in their adult life have experienced a situation where they have to get 100 math facts correct in 60 seconds.

In a world where there is more and more knowledge to obtain and skills to acquire, there is a lot of pressure to stuff all of it into young minds. It is not uncommon to see terms like median and mean being introduced as early as 2nd and 3rd grade - terms that I didn't encounter until college statistics. I passed a kindergarten classroom singing "Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes" but instead it was "Head, Thorax, Abdomen". Apparently the standardized tests expect them to know those terms, even though the word "thorax" will likely only be used by those who head into the field of entymology. Let's remember kindergartners have a little while before they have to make those type of career path choices. 

Our world is changing. A recent survey of the youth in our church asked what children and teens wished their parents knew. The top two things:

• That I feel a lot of pressure
• That my life is scary/hard

I don't remember feeling that about my childhood. Maybe I am forgetting, but I don't remember the same pressure that I see in my own children's lives.

Doing what we've always done is not always the right thing. Doing what we've always done and adding to it with new areas is also not always the right thing to do. You can only add so much before one reaches the markers of pressure and stress. And as much as I don't want to acknowledge that, our children live there.

I think for many, analog time is a non-issue. Perhaps because it is outside their "struggle zone". Academics came easy for me and had you asked me in my 20's I would have a totally different answer than I have now that I have two dyslexic children. If something comes easy, it is easy to not ask if it is necessary. Only when it is a struggle do we seem to stop and ask if we really have to do it.

Yet maybe we should be asking it, even if there aren't struggling students. With so many feeling pressured maybe we need to look at what we can get by with not doing instead of charging ahead and adding to an already overstuffed curriculum.

Is analog time really that big of a deal?  Maybe the bigger deal is that we don't always stop to think about whether the things we grew up learning are still relevant to our children. Or maybe we don't stop to think about the stressful effect of the information revolution on our students. Whether or not to teach analog time is really not the big deal.

Unless math already is really hard for you

and you are in second grade

and you still don't know your addition basics

and the only place you'll ever see an analog clock is in school

and you have a Spiderman digital wristwatch that works just fine.

Vigilance or paranoia?

I had just stopped by my 10 year old's Sunday School class to help her pin her hair up and then pick up some notepaper at the coat rack where my family congregates after services when it happened. The halls were thinning out to very little traffic. Sunday School teachers could be heard getting their students attention and getting class going. The hum of the normal Sunday at church was underway and then I saw him. Average height, sandy blond hair, a struggling beard, young, a forest green backpack with odd bulges, black turtleneck under a parka, a hesitant step, twitching hands, a face that wouldn't meet my own, a man looking at everything except the people around him.

It didn't feel right, so I paused my course and watched for a minute, thinking that my feelings would abate in observation. He would look into a classroom scanning it. Was he looking for a child? His child? My gut said no - he couldn't possibly be old enough to have a 10 year old. Maybe a baby, not a child this old. Maybe a younger sibling? Still the nervous hands, the shuffling gait as he moved to another room to scope it out. And a chill ran through my own mind. What was in the back pack? Why was this man so nervous? why would he not meet the eyes of others? What was he doing at the beginning of a class period looking around at the classrooms?

He rounded the far corner of the hall, and I squashed an urge to follow. Suddenly mad at myself for thinking the worst. Mad that my mind automatically turned towards Sandy Hook and Columbine. Mad that I think that way. That I walk through the halls assessing the "danger factor" of common strangers. I went back to my seat in the sanctuary and the anger faded but my unease didn't. My husband noticed. Asked twice what was wrong before I finally answered that I wished I didn't see people and think the worst. He asked what I saw and then told me if I had red flags going off that I needed to trust my instincts. I needed to go tell someone.

There are few people in life that I listen to as much as I listen to my husband. I didn't trust my own instincts, fearing paranoia - but if he trusted them I needed to act. I circled back through the classrooms hoping to see something to invalidate my unease, but the man was gone. I wondered about the other levels of classrooms. Was he looking there? Was he by the children's amphitheater? My heart sunk to even think of that scenario. The amphitheater is one of the neatest, most kid friendly spaces in the church, and it would be jam packed with children. A fishbowl for a shooter.

With that grisly idea in mind I went to one of the leaders I knew. I didn't know how to start the conversation. 99.999% chance that this was all in my head. I briefly thought of what they would think of me - a paranoid parent, more so now than when I camped by the one way mirror in the nursery area to see if my babies would stop crying.

Since my children were that age so many things have changed my world. I am a parent of 911. My husband and I worked closely alongside a man we trusted in youth ministry, only to find that he had groomed a young teen and continued an abusive relationship with her for years. The damage done in that former church still echoes through my life. I don't trust people anymore. I don't trust my instincts about them. I don't trust that church is a safe place for my children.

Before that there was my own upbringing. My father was an OPFOR leader (opposing forces) . He was in charge of being the enemy for military training sessions. He regularly spoke on the topic of home defense. He testified in court as a weapon specialist. He was a gunsmith and had a class three firearms license. We grew up shooting pretty much any weapon that you can imagine in our front yard on a plot outside the city limits of a small mountain town. After Columbine, he was one of those who helped train teachers, first response teams, SWAT teams and counter-terrorism forces.

It's hard to imagine that didn't effect my grown-up outlook today. A former pastor used to come to me after heated words had been stated in business meetings, or overheard in the church parking-lot. My mind was a recorder. I remembered the exact wording of statements. I was hyper-vigilant and would assess the reactions to events in a room full of people. I was crowd conscious. When I was tired, I was easily overwhelmed as I had no way to filter visual and auditory information out.

My mind has dulled since then. I no longer notice everything. I can't tell you the order of sentences in a debate. But I still find myself assessing things. The closest way out of a building. The tenor of a group of people chatting in the lobby. The body language of a stranger in the halls. . .

"I'm jumping at shadows." I told my friend behind the counter. "It's probably nothing, but there was a guy scouting out the classrooms in the B200s." To her immense credit she handled everything exactly right. Calm and cool she took down the description I gave her. I knew that it would get radioed to key leaders in different areas of the building to be on the look-out. Later another one of those leaders would thank me for my vigilance. By that time I would be even more convinced that it wasn't vigilance, but paranoia.

I returned to the worship service in the sanctuary. My husband looked at me. "You did what you needed to. Two weeks ago we had training on this. They said the number one thing is to trust your instincts." My husband works at a place that is a potential terrorist target. It didn't surprise me that they had that type of training there. "I just want to go back and camp in her Sunday School class." I shakily replied. He squeezed my hand. "There's a place where you have to trust God too, you can't be with them all of the time."

I smile as I write this, wondering how I got so lucky as to have a man like that in my life. He definitely keeps me grounded. A sermon on marriage was good. Not a full distraction, but a comforting one. I turned my crowd assessment inward looking for areas to improve in my life, things I could do to be more supportive for my husband. A definition of the word "submit"  that was far outside of the doormat style obedience that I had been taught as a child fascinated me and I found encouragement there.

The service ended and we split up, my husband and I, and "Uncle" Steve; they to retrieve my children from various parts of the building and me to a teachers meeting in preparation for the next worship hour. The teachers meeting had not started, and I found my footsteps wandering through the building back to my daughters classroom. The halls had heavy traffic. Parents picking up children. People making their way to the coffee dispensers. People leaving one service, people coming to another. And in the mass of bodies I saw him again.

No parka, no backpack now, just a simple black turtleneck, but the same shuffle, the same twitch to the hands. This time I followed. As I did so I noticed the rhythm to the twitches in the hands. I began to suspect a medical condition instead of stress. The black shoes had thick heavy soles, not combat boots, but corrective soles. He ducked down into one of the alcoves in the hall, and pulled out the green bulging backpack. I continued following and watching. The body language was bugging me less, but the pack still bothered me. Who carries a backpack to church? Well, I do - I reasoned with myself. I carry a pack with my laptop in it many Sundays. That doesn't look like a laptop in that pack though. It hangs oddly, like there is something too long in it.

I argue with myself, remembering some of the sniper rifles that my father had. Ones that came in pieces. But those are rarely used in shootings. It is the assault rifles and handguns that are the usual culprits. It is hard to hide an assault rifle in a backpack. The man goes into another classroom. He sets the pack down and begins to open it. I watch through the open door from a vantage point down the hall. The man pulls out the pieces to a music stand and begins to set up. The red flags are gone, and in their place warring for the top feeling are both a sense of profound relief that what I had feared was not the case and a sense of embarrassment that I had so misread the situation.

Today as I write this down. I am looking at the events and still uncertain if the path that I walk is one of vigilance or one of paranoia. I laugh as I imagine someone else coming to the nursery counter reporting a tall odd looking woman with a backpack wearing a vintage military jacket stalking down strangers in the hallways.

I tend to look at my husbands words as wise, his training as something that God had given the timing for. I am thankful for the leaders in our Children's ministry who are the solid type of people that take everything, including suspicious stranger alerts, in stride and calmly. If I am indeed paranoid, which is something I suspect I lean towards, I am praying that it is a weakness that God can use to show his strength through and not one that the devil can exploit.

Thinking about Lydia (Part 1 - Backstory)

Not the tattooed lady, but the Lydia of Acts 16.

It is a very interesting story, but best when viewed with a little context. In Acts 15, Paul and Barnabas start facing a very divisive argument within the early church. Or maybe I should say the toddler church. It had been birthed in Jerusalem and grown to Antioch through persecution and now it is starting to take those first wobbly steps on it's own. And those wobbly steps lead it to an immediate impasse.

Funny how I often find that I'll go a chapter or two back to get context and I really need to keep going back further and further to make the story make sense. Back in Acts 10 the apostle Simon Peter, a close follower of Jesus, and one of the key leaders in the fledgling church had a vision. Through this vision he came to understand that God was breaking down some major cultural barriers and offering salvation from sins to the Gentile (non-Jewish) population.

Peter acts upon direction from the Lord and goes to the house of Cornelius, a Roman centurion in the Italian division. I always laugh at this. God wanted to make sure that the first Gentile Christian could be marked as nothing close to Jewish. Part of the occupying Roman army, Cornelius was further an Italian. A foreigner who could not possibly be one ounce Jewish.

In the following months Peter defends the work that God has done, and like so many things that God touches it flourishes and the good news of Jesus is soon reaching Gentiles everywhere, but especially in Antioch. Antioch was so different than Jerusalem. A seaport town full of merchants and traders from the four corners of the known world, it had a highly diverse (and highly Gentile) population compared to the Jewish cultural center that Jerusalem was.

The early church took it's first steps into Antioch under the persecution of Saul. They fled there looking for refuge from those trying to stamp out the movement by imprisoning and killing the followers of Jesus. The news that God had opened the door for Gentiles to grasp a hold of this new faith in Jesus as the Messiah must have been particularly potent in Antioch.

So it isn't too surprising that when some people from Judea came to Antioch and started saying that the Gentiles needed to be circumcised in order to be saved that it caused a ruckus. On the surface this seems an almost inevitable thing to happen in the "culture wars" surrounding the early church. However the ramifications were pretty insidious. On the surface it looked like a faction merely declaring that in order to be saved that one must convert to Judiasm. But the argument bit deeply at the roots of a faith claiming that there wasn't anything one could do to be saved.

Paul, and Barnabas and other Christians were sent with this argument back to Jerusalem to James and the other apostolic leaders to sort out an official standing from the church leadership. I imagine it was a rough time for Paul and Barnabas. We aren't told, but I surmise that their travelling companions were opposing their opinion on the matter. That would make it a long trip to Jerusalem. Especially since these two men, Paul and Barnabas, were fully aware of how deeply the argument impacted the churches basic point of faith.

God continued to work and once the group got to Jerusalem the matter was settled decisively. Gentiles were recognized to be Christians by simply having faith in Jesus the Messiah. They were encouraged to follow some Jewish customs but they did not need to become Jews in order to have the doors of absolution opened to them. I wonder if Paul and Barnabas felt a rush of relief at that decision.

They return to Antioch with the news but shortly thereafter fall into disagreement about who their travelling companions for the next journey should be. I wonder if after the trip to Jerusalem, Paul was only willing to take those he knew would be steadfastly on his side. John Mark is noted to have deserted him in previous travels and Paul isn't willing to give the young man a second chance. Barnabas, the man known for his encouragement is less judgmental about John Mark and the rift that is caused between these two friends on this issue is a sharp one. It tears their partnership apart and sends them in different directions.

The Bible is so good at giving us the framework of a story and leaving other things to our imagination. In my imagination I can almost hear the sharp angry words between these two men. In my imagination I think that the separation had to have had an effect on them both, but especially Paul who had been mentored and encouraged by Barnabas in his first days as a believer. Those first days must have seemed pretty miraculous as men like Ananias and Barnabas accepted him - the guy who had been hunting them down and sending them to jail and death. (Yes, Paul was his new name - he was formerly called Saul, the man who was violently instrumental in the dispersion of the Jerusalem community of believers.) So it is, I imagine, that Paul comes into chapter 16 of Acts reeling a bit from recent events.

I cannot say that he was discouraged, though I imagine it to be a possibility. I cannot say that the start of this new venture had to be soured a bit by the argument he and Barnabas had, but I imagine that too, to be a possibility. And into this I see God continuing to work. Paul had great plans as to where he would go and what he would do on this journey. He comes to Derbe and snatches up Timothy as a young man to mentor, and then he tries to go to Asia.

Twice in the next few verses it mentions that God prevents Paul from going where he wants to go. Yet after that he has a vision of a Macedonian man pleading for his aid. It is a different direction than he had intended and I wonder where Paul is mentally and emotionally.I wonder exactly how the Holy Spirit kept Paul and his company from going forward with their own plans. It seems in early church history that miracles were far more prevalent and public then they are today and I wonder if it was a miraculous happenstance, or if like today, God led in the mundane closings and openings of circumstances.

I wonder what the "take away" thoughts should be on this passage and the ones preceding it. I sometimes get wrapped up in how I should teach the leading of the Spirit to room full of impressionable 5th graders. After all, I have had no visions or dreams of import. I have not spoken in languages that I didn't learn nor have I heard someone speaking like that to me. I haven't seen the Spirit of God descend in flames of fire upon the heads of those who believe or felt the rush of wind indoors described on the day of Pentecost.

So sometimes I wonder, briefly if I have the right to tell them that the Holy Spirit can lead them if they are open to his promptings. Upon contemplation of my own life though, I find that in looking back I can see the hand of God. It isn't as dramatic as it was in Paul's life or as frequent to my perception, but at critical junctures I see His influence and direction. I see the peace he gave me when dating the man who would become my husband. I see his direction out of full-time ministry in the church; a choice I  know that we would not have had the strength to make on our own. Currently I see my own Asia - two attempts to take up the mantle of an educator, one ended completely, the other possibly ended and at the very least on hold.

And I think that the "take away" for me may only be partially the concept that God leads. I think for me it goes beyond this to "God has a plan" and maybe that Gods plan cannot be driven astray by our own shortcomings - a comforting thought.

 In looking at the whole of Acts and even beyond it we see that Paul eventually asks for the companionship of John Mark when he is imprisoned. We see that the sharp conflict driving two men of God apart is still used to reach people who had not heard the news of Jesus. We see that Gods plan is often bigger than our own horizons. Some in the early church were locked into cultural boundaries. Very few would have seen Christianity reaching arcoss the world via the hands of the Gentile population, and yet that is exactly what happens.

I wonder about what happens to Cornelius the Italian Roman. Or the other minor characters that we meet in Acts. Their stories just give us a short glimpse into their lives. The travelling man from Ethiopia whom Phillip was miraculously transported to (yes, "beam me up, Scotty." starts in Acts) to explain the scripture he was reading. I wonder what happened to him after his conversion.  I wonder about Lydia who will be soon coming into this story as yet another cultural hurdle to be crumbled by the spread of a faith in God. These were real people who had real personalities and problems. Who had friends and families that they talked to. People that they told the most important news that they had heard - a message that God has a plan and that his plan was to save the broken and the bad and bring them back to himself.