Ignorance
Kids have a way of wrecking us don’t they?
They have a way of revealing our blindspots and stating them out loud for the world to hear.
One of my friends told me a story about a game she plays with her six year old. Everyday on their way home from school, her daughter picks a letter of the alphabet and a word that corresponds with the letter. The exercise is meant to help her learn the meanings of words.
What she didn’t know is this little game would wreck her understanding of words. If many of us had to guess, we would guess the letter “x” or “q” got her, but it wasn’t either of those letters. The beginning letter of the word that got her? “I” Why would starting with an “I” trip her up?
Ignorance.
As her daughter asked the meaning of the word ignorance, she stumbled through a definition while realizing a haunting fact about defining the word. She couldn’t explain ignorance without reaching for a negative connotation. The mental sorting of words like stupid, short-sided, or dumb left her with very few words to work with in describing this word neutrally.
And that’s when the realization about ignorance came over her. Our definition of ignorance is tainted. It’s no longer a word describing lack of awareness. It’s a label. A dismissive one at that. Ignorance is a state of being our world doesn’t give you permission to have anymore.
And as I reflected on her story, I’ve started to realize we don’t give ourselves permission to be ignorant. We hide our ignorance these days. We nonchalauntly search google. We nod unknowingly. We fake it till we make it. Or worse, we surround ourselves with people so similar to us that we will never run into a situation where we have to admit we are ignorant about something.
All the while, we lose something. Each time we hide or don’t disclose our ignorance, we miss an opportunity for true transformation. We lose the gift of awareness. And we don’t know it, but it is a gift to know that we don’t know anything. We’ve lost the process of awareness.
And I want us to get it back.
Here is a step in how I believe we get it back.
What It Takes
One of my heroes is Rich Villodas, a writer of immense wisdom, has a phrase that will do us all some good to chew on in this process of becoming comfortable with our ignorance. Here is the principle in one simple sentence:
“Our level of offendability often reveals our level of maturity.”1
Becoming aware of this one principle is how we begin to learn how to be comfortable in the areas we are simply ignorant about in life. Coming to know what we don’t know takes maturity. By maturity, he means our ability to differentiate our ideas about something from our ideas of ourselves. Not being able to separate the two leads to us becoming offended. A state of offensiveness is a posture that welcomes defensiveness. And when we become defensive, we tend to not get anywhere in knowing anything new.
Think about the last time you were embarrassed. What’s our first instinct if we don’t choose flight or fight (or as one of my friends has become fond of saying, when we choose violence)? We tend to deflect. We explain. We attempt to defend. We reframe.
Why?
Because we won’t let maturity take the driver’s seat and instead we let our emotions towards being ignorant about something be tied with how we feel about ourselves or how others feel about us.
But here is the key to the door of ignorance. When we step outside of ourselves, and learn what we don’t know or didn’t know when it was just ourselves, we open our hearts up to true transformation. It’s in these moments of the Spirit of God that help connect what we now know in our heads to also be true in our hearts.
But to brave knowing what we don’t know takes maturity. It takes humility. It is a willingness to be internally uncomfortable with ourselves. It’s willingly going to wade in the side of the pool which our feet can no longer touch.
To be offended is a choice. And it’s usually a choice that clouds our vision to see the world in a different way that we can’t see on our own. It takes mature work to not let our ego, our reputation, and our identity get wrapped up in interpreting information that we do not know.
And other than it being the right thing to do, what should motivate us to enter into ignorance with maturity? Well to put it simply, it doesn’t just help you, but it helps everyone around you.
Let me give you an example to bring this home.
The Cost…
The correlation still knocks me off my feet from time to time.
I learned a simple principle from Dr. Korie Edwards who was informing people of a trend found in churches. The topic? Race? Specifically, multiethnic churches.
She spent countless hours looking into the healthiness that developed communities of faith that contained a diversity of ethnicities in one faith community. Communities that truly were diverse in their background and action not just in appearance.
Her driving question: What’s the most important element of a community of faith becoming more multiethnic?
The answer. Two words.
White people.
I still remember being shocked at the answer. And here is what she meant. The number one factor leading a community to either flourish or shrivel up in ehtnic diversity wasn’t based on comfortability of people of color. It wasn’t about information. It wasn’t even about settings.
It all depended on those who were white.
Why?
In her research she found that churches will only become as multiethnic as the acceptance of the ignorance of those in the community who are white. She found a consistent correlation between the two. Time and time again the difference was based on how willing the white members of a faith community were willing to be uncomfortable and confess ignorance in what the community needed.2
When white people weren’t willing to be uncomfortable. When white people were defensive. When white people got up from the table, everyone else would get up from the table. When white people’s ability to listen decreased, so did the productivity and rate in which the community experienced true diversity.
Why?
Simple: When we’re not mature enough to learn beyond our own experience (especially in a majority culture) we don’t create space geared towards others who have different experiences.
Another way to say it universally, when we don’t practice maturity, we can’t even begin to know what we don’t even know we don’t know.
Why is it important that Christians gather around a blood stained table to celebrate the one who guarantees us all true transformation. It’s honoring the one who bears all our experiences and not only relates to them but heals them. And we have a chance to encounter this transformation by the God Jesus knows.
Please don’t forget that every minute you walk on this planet, there is potential for you to experience transformation. An identity in Jesus means you don’t have to have your identity wrapped up in what you know or don’t know. Awareness of Jesus means you’re empowered to be aware of others.
I heard that the amount of content we take in each day is equivalent to the amount of content our great grandfather’s took in during a lifetime, and still none of us can know it all. We all come from one region. Maybe a few cultures. None of us can be born transcending our upbringing. We all have something to learn.
So we might as well live in a posture that actually allows God to usher us into this awareness that brings transformation.
In other words, we should choose maturity not offense.
We should listen outside of the inner narratives running in our heads. Listening outside of ourselves, from people not like ourselves, reveals what we don’t know about ourselves.
It comes from our little sister.
It comes from those who don’t have as much education as you.
It comes from those who aren’t your ethnicity.
It comes from those who you mentor.
It comes from those who come from a different location of the world.
It comes from those who have lived less life than you.
It comes from those who don’t have the same experiences as you do.
The Spirit of God uses voices we don’t personally know to reveal to us what we don’t even know we don’t know.
And I don’t know about you, but I’d like to be in the know.
And where does it start?
Ignorance. Maturity. And humility.
A posture that says, “I don’t know what I don’t know.”
References
1Rich Villodas, The Deeply Formed Life (Colorado Springs: WaterBrook, 2020), 71.
2Here is a sample of Korie Edwards’ work on race and multiethnic communities. I’ve gleaned a lot of her research from the work and thoughts of Albert Tate.