Tried With Fire

Has listening without interjecting ourselves become a lost art? I finished listening to an audio version of "The Gifts of Imperfection" by Brene Brown. Yes I know she is secular, but I appreciate her research. In my opinion, her strength lies in identifying patterns of behavior by listening to thousands of people, which is way beyond my limited scope of humanity. At the end of the book, she describes the research process and writes this - "When I code data (analyze the stories), I go into deep researcher mode where my only focus is on accurately capturing what I heard in the stories. I don't think about how I would say something, only how they said it. I don't think about what an experience would mean to me , only what it meant to the person who told me about it." (pg. 129, italics mine) This requires a lot of self-discipline because Brown has to take herself out of the picture and objectively examine what others have said. This goes against our defaul...

I've been listening to I Thought It Was Just Me (but it isn't) by Brene Brown. She is known for her research in the dynamics of shame, and this book is specifically for women and shame. I don't know whether Brown is a Christian or not. She doesn't bring God explicitly into her writings at all. However, her work is very helpful because it names what many of us experience and also raises issues that may hinder us as individual Christians and/or communities. In the section on shame triggers, Brown writes of identity as being a primary trigger but from two aspects. The first is desired identity. I want or need to be this. I want people to see me as that. If not, I have not measured up to whatever this desired identity is, which brings shame. However the second aspect is where she grabbed my attention - unwanted identity . This is the case where we are given an identity that is not truly ours by others. Growing up as an Asian American in an era where there was inaccur...