Month: December 2012

Immanuel

Sadness has fallen over our land since last Friday and the tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut.

Over these last few days my thoughts have wandered to the days when my three sons were in kindergarten. I imagine what I would feel if this tragedy had happened to them. I know I would be full of questions: what, how, and, the biggie, why. I would want to know did my child suffer, was he scared, did he know what was happening and the danger he was in. And I would want to know where was God.

When I read the news accounts and see the photos, my sadness is overcome with numbness; numbness because of the massive amount of grief and loss parents, brothers, sisters, grandparents and neighbors are feeling. How can a parent continue in the face of such loss? There is only one way I could continue and I was reminded of it yesterday in church as one of the pastors prayed for the children, parents and community and invoked the name of Immanuel, God with us, an ancient name for Jesus.

That first Christmas 2000 years ago began months earlier with a visit from the angel Gabriel to Mary. He told her that she was going to have a baby and he would be called Immanuel which means God with us. And so God broke through into humanity and came to earth as a tiny, helpless baby. That doesn’t seem like the plan the God of the universe would devise. Surely with his power and might he could come up with something more spectacular. Nevertheless, a baby was born and he was Immanuel.

Shortly after he was born, wise men came looking for him. They tipped off King Herod that a new king had been born and they wanted to know where he was. Herod’s chief priests suggested that they try Bethlehem where the prophets had predicted the Messiah would be born. Herod, enraged by this threat to his throne, ordered that all male babies younger than two years old be killed. And so, one night soldiers rampaged through Bethlehem murdering little babies. God was with Mary and Joseph and Immanuel and they had already fled to Egypt.

Jesus Immanuel grew up just like any other child would grow. He became a man and experienced everything we experience except that he didn’t sin. He was sad and grieved when his friend Lazarus died. He experienced fear and questioned God when he was facing his own death. He felt God pull his presence away as he hung on a cross, suffering toward death. Immanuel leaned on these experiences on Friday in that school with his arms around those little children.

We ask why terrible things happen, especially when it happens to little ones as innocent as kindergarten students. We will probably never know the reason, or at least a reason that makes any sense to us. What we do know is that we live in a world tainted with sin. More than tainted. It is a world in which sin proliferates. It is a dark world. Only when God breaks through, Immanuel, is the darkness lifted and the light shines bright.

We are sad. Parents are grieving. And this is right and appropriate. Take solace in knowing that Immanuel is here. On Friday, God was with the little children and brave adults as they met death. Today God is with us. Tomorrow God will still be with us. So  through our tears we sing:

Praise God from whom all blessings flow; praise him, all creatures below; praise him above ye heavenly hosts; praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost.

God is with us. May you know his presence this Christmas season as we celebrate the birth of Immanuel.

Letting Go

As I write this, Christmas Day is fourteen days away. That’s just two weeks. Yikes! Christmas is approaching and my expectations, as well as my anxiety, are rising.

How about you? As Christmas approaches are your expectations rising?

In Webster’s the first definition of expectation is “a looking forward to; anticipation”. It’s the excitement of seeing how all of the preparations we’re spending so much time, attention and money to get just right unfold. The second definition is “a looking for as due, proper, or necessary”. Applied to this time of year, one definition tends toward the positive and one definition towards the negative. When we get so wrapped up in the expectations of Christmas as those things that we think are due, proper or necessary our expectations have a tendency to cause anxiety and, in the end, dissatisfaction.

Think about it for a moment. What are your expectations of Christmas? What are the due, proper, and necessary things that mean Christmas to you?

Here’s my list:

  1. Buying the perfect gift for everyone
  2. Preparing a scrumptious Christmas dinner, from scratch, of course
  3. Glittering decorations adorning inside and out
  4. A tree beautiful enough to grace the pages of Architectural Digest

This is only the beginning. It is due, proper and necessary that I fit in church services and family traditions all the while maintaining family relationships that are happy and peaceful. Does any of this sound familiar?

My list of due, proper, and necessary expectations will certainly not result in expectations of looking forward to Christmas in anticipation. I know. It was my modus operandi for years. And then I learned about the art of letting go.

It happened when my both of my parents lived in an assisted-living facility for dementia patients. The first Christmas they were in the Haven, I kept thinking “It’s not supposed to be this way.” This was not what I thought was due, proper or necessary as far as Christmas was concerned. Slowly it dawned on me that this was Christmas even though all the things I thought made Christmas weren’t going to happen. I wasn’t going to plan and prepare the Christmas dinner with my mom. There would be no unwrapping of gifts around their tree.  Trying to accomplish all the due, proper and necessary expectations kept me from enjoying my parents on their level. It caused even more stress in their lives than was necessary. All of the things I had taken for granted about Christmas I had to let go.

Your life may also be at a place where the things that make up your expectations, those due, proper and necessary things, are not going to happen as they used to. For whatever reason our lives are not as they were when we first started developing Christmas traditions. Some of those reasons are:

  1. Managing at least two extended families, yours and your spouses and perhaps ex-spouses
  2. The addition of a child either by birth or adoption
  3. Parents are older or passed away
  4. Children are grown up and have families of their own
  5. Married children have additional extended families
  6. We may have family relationships that are strained or estranged

We can try to keep all the expectations of due, proper and necessary and experience stress and strain, lack of Christmas joy and reverence, or we can examine our expectations and let go of some of them.

This suggestion may be shocking to you. Everything about our culture shouts that expectations of what is due, proper and necessary is what Christmas is all about. From Black Friday, to secular Christmas music to Christmas movies and TV shows, Christmas is the time when problems are solved, the perfect gift is just waiting under the tree, and all strained family relationships heal in one magical day.

But what about that first Christmas, the one that we have taken a snapshot of and memorialized in our nativity sets and crèches? The idyllic night of angel songs and visits from exotic wise men?

Even Mary and Joseph had expectations that they had to let go. Read the accounts of the Christmas story in Matthew and Luke. As you read make a list of all of the expectations the Holy Family had to let go. You will see that first Christmas in a new way.

What are some of the expectations you should let go? What gets in your way of enjoying Christmas in all its love, joy and peace? Are there things that get in the way of your family’s enjoyment of Christmas because you can’t let go?

 Dear friend, you are held in the Father’s hand. Let go of those things you think are due, proper, and necessary, the things that come between you and what he deems as due, proper and necessary. As you do, may you experience the warmth of his hand cradling you, drawing you through Christmas and ever closer to him through Jesus, the one this season is all about.

Merry Christmas!

You can hear more about letting go by clicking on the link below. It will take you to the website of mmLearn.org, a service of Morningside Ministries. mmLearn.org is designed for caregivers, both those who work in care facilities and those who care for loved ones at home. In their Prayers for a Caregiver series I recorded “Letting Go“, a devotional upon which this blog post is based. Give it a listen and let me know what you think.

Ask Your Own Questions

Who questions much, shall learn much, and retain much. Francis Bacon

An interview on NPR put my thoughts into high gear. They rushed by like cars on the autobahn as I remembered times in my life when I made decisions that I didn’t question hard enough. I got into a lot of trouble in those situations. The interview was with two people who were talking about teaching students to ask questions. The idea intrigued me. Could I teach myself to ask questions? So I ordered the interviewees’ book: Make Just One Change: Teach Students to Ask Their Own Questions. The authors (and interviewees) are Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana. They are the codirectors of the Right Question Institute.

The Question Formula Technique first came about when the authors were working with parents in a low-income community. The parents explained that they didn’t get involved in their children’s education or in their children’s school because they didn’t know what to ask. Therefore, Rothstein and Santana gave them some questions to ask. Soon the parents came back for more questions. This situation sent the authors on a long journey to develop a system that would teach students to figure out for themselves questions to ask in any situation.

Students asking questions didn’t seem unusual until I thought about my own classroom experience. Normally the teacher asks the questions and the students answer the questions. With the Question Formulation Technique (QFT), students learn how to come up with their own questions. Their questions can then be applied to an endless variety of uses: write a research paper, the basis for a project or the substance of a unit of study.

Not being a teacher, it sounded like a difficult thing to get students to ask questions that would be useful for further study. However, the case studies of students in actual classrooms that Rothstein and Santana presented to illustrate each step of the process revealed that asking their own questions helped students learn better. Those who questioned much learned much.

The QFT has four steps:

  1. Ask as many questions as you can.
  2. Categorize the questions as closed or open-ended questions.
  3. Prioritize the questions.
  4. What are you going to do with the questions? What are the next steps?

The most difficult part of the process is deciding on the Question Focus, or QFocus, which is  what the students ask the questions about. The QFocus has its own set of parameters:

  1. It has a clear focus. It is an issue, topic or area of concern that is brief and simply stated.
  2. It is not a question. The purpose of the QFocus is to get the students started asking their own questions.

According to the book, it takes about 45 minutes to teach the QFT to a class of students. Just for illustration purposes, let’s take a QFocus and work the technique right now.

Question Focus: Santa Claus

Step 1: Ask as many questions as you can.

Who is Santa Claus?

Where did he come from?

Does he really climb down a chimney?

What does Santa Claus do the rest of the year?

Why does Santa Claus only give toys to good little boys and girls?

What behavior is so bad that Santa Claus won’t give a child a toy?

Step 2: Categorize the questions as closed or open-ended questions. This step includes a discussion of the types of information open and closed questions will draw out and an exercise to change questions from one type to the other. For the purposes of this exercise, the questions will be marked with “c” for closed and “o” for open, but not re-worded.

c/o    Who is Santa Claus?

c        Where did he come from?

c        Does he really climb down a chimney?

o/c     What does Santa Claus do the rest of the year?

o        Why does Santa Claus only give toys to good little boys and

           girls?

c/o    What behavior is so bad that Santa Claus won’t give a child a

           toy?

Step 3: Prioritize the questions.

1. Who is Santa Claus?

2. Where did he come from?

3. Why does Santa Claus only give toys to good little boys and girls?

4. What behavior is so bad that Santa Claus won’t give a child a toy?

5. What does Santa Claus do the rest of the year?

6. Does he really climb down a chimney?

Step 4: What are you going to do with the questions? What are the next steps?

Write a research paper about Santa Claus.

Before I read this book I thought that questions usually denote confusion. However, I realize now that working the steps of the QFT transforms confused thinking into focused thinking. I hope you can see how useful this technique would be not only for students, but for adults as well. For instance, suppose you were concerned about an issue like immigration, the national debt, the mortgage foreclosure crisis, or the state of education. These are complicated issues, overwhelming issues. Develop your own QFocus and work through the QFT. Use the resulting questions to focus your research and clarify your opinion.

The last chapter of the book is titled “Questions and Education, Questions and Democracy” in which Rothstein and Santana make a strong case that the ability to ask good questions leads to better informed citizens who are more likely to participate in the democratic process. How much more vibrant and effective would our government be if the voters asked questions and informed themselves instead of relying on the media and candidates’ sound bytes for information? Our constitution gives us the right to ask questions; the Question Formulation Technique developes our ability to ask questions.

So what do you want to know about? Santa Claus, climate change, vegetarianism, a facet of economic theory? Determine your Question Focus. Work the Question Formulation Technique and write some questions. Have fun finding the answers.