Live Into Who You Want To Be

I watched an initial training for the Nurtured Heart Approach today. It is a child development system that seeks not just to reduce "poor" behavior but to turn the energy of the caregivers toward "good" behavior. In one segment the observation is made that if you asked a bunch of kids to suggest behavior rules for their own group, they would begin to list things like no hitting, no yelling, no talking while the teacher is talking, no horseplay, and no throwing things. Pretty standard, uh? 

Do you notice anything about that list? It's a list of "nos." The kids have been taught that rules are "don't do this and don't do that." This is so ingrained in them that when asked for their rules, they readily provide a stream of what not to do. The problem here is obvious - there are no expectations or rules for what you are supposed to be doing. There isn't even a mix of answers from the kids of positive and negative rules - they are all negative: no.

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

The problem with negative rules, especially when the concept is so obviously deeply ingrained in us is that we don't know what to do. We can meet all the negative rules by simply sitting on our hands. Why don't we make positive rules: "be kind, be considerate, be patient, be helpful, be respectful, be responsible?" I suspect that if we focused on what to do - and reinforced it in a positive manner - the negative behaviors we don't want would slowly disappear.  In the mix, we might learn how to be.

In the Christian tradition, we have a long history of making up negative rules. This isn't entirely our fault in 2020 since we do have the Decalogue which is pretty negatively stated and then a seeming unending story of God punishing people for doing stuff wrongly. Then again, one of the most famous preachers and sermons are Johnathan Edwards and his "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." And of course, the development in the Christian system of original sin and total depravity which do nothing much other than to reinforce the view that you are bad and need to be controlled. Whether we like it or not, much of Christianity buys into this paradigm.—using no rules.

One significant reason the Law could not save people is because not doing things, can’t save anyone. This because the point of the Christian tradition is the transformation of people into the image of God. Galatians 5 and its parallels are quite clear what sort of people God expects us to become.

There are some benefits to the negative approach and a challenge for the positive one. One benefit of the negative is that it is usually phrased very specifically - we should have no doubt about what specifically we are not supposed to be doing. After all, don't murder is pretty specific and unambiguous. Don't throw things is similarly not open to much interpretation. But if I tell you to be kind, what does that look like? The one being kind and the one to whom she is being kind may disagree on just what that is. So the positive has some challenges because they can be considerably vague. 

This is a common problem. It is exactly why Paul's letters so often have concrete examples in them,. Paul has to tell us what he’s expecting. In Ephesians, we find an admonition to be submissive to each other, and then a series of examples of what that means. You want me to submit to my wife - just how does a first-century husband do that, Paul? Paul gives us a short excursus on what that might look like in Ephesus to help us see what it is he’s after.

We can still hear - or read in our feeds - folks who lament those whose messages are too upbeat and positive because well you know, people should be told what they're doing wrong and how bad they are. We don't want to be scratching peoples' ears, you know. We humans love structure and we don’t want to get in trouble, so we often want to know the specifics and no rules provide a handy way of solving that problem. And so we get another sermon about what not to do.

Negatives then are usually specific and positives are often vague. How are we to nurture the positives in each other? By spending more time and energy in seeing what others are doing that are positive, and then commenting on it. Sometimes this is called “catching people doing good, and that phrase captures the idea. If instead of looking to ferret out what others are doing that they shouldn’t be doing, we want to actively look for those times and behaviors that lead in a positive direction — that actually will result in transformed people. If we notice and reinforce positive behavior sufficiently, the negative behaviors will naturally fall away. If I have become kindness incarnated, the chances of me murdering you are pretty slim and we don't need to use "don't murder" as a rule. We will have shaped each other into disciples and images of Jesus. And that’s what we want.