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Proof.

We don’t live in a “first things first” culture. We procrastinate.

Procrastination is using the pursuit of one thing to justify our neglect of another. It’s distraction. It goes deeper than the “TV now, study later” life. Way deeper. Subconscious deep.

Have you ever heard a pastor or a priest say that meeting a good guy or girl won’t solve your problems? Or that your dream job won’t fill the void. Or that money won’t make you happy.

He’s right. Few think he isn’t. Very few consciously pursue those things to solve problems. I’d even say lots don’t pursue them for those reasons, even subconsciously. But some, I’d say, do subconsiously pursue them… for proof.

If I had a successful relationship…

If I got the job…

If I made X amount of money…

I’d have proof that there is no problem. That there is no void. That “I’m happy.”

But it doesn’t usually work like that. If you get what you pursue, you find you have it plus a problem. It plus a void.

We know what distracts us. We usually know it well. But do we know it’s a distraction? Do we know from what it distracts us?

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Twenty minutes: Wholehearted.

I couldn’t do it justice if I tried, so I won’t describe this video. But I will implore you to take 20 minutes out of your day to watch or listen to it. Worth it. Trust me. Fabulous. Thanks to Rhett Smith for posting it on his blog this morning.

If you’re reading this on a blog reader and you don’t see a video above this line, click the title of the post and see it at my blog.

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“Tonight.”

Last weekend, on my way to a church in Tampa, I decided I’d listen to America’s top songs for the week on the radio. I don’t like to admit it, but I’m a semi-closeted sucker for pop music and shows like Ryan Seacrest’s are how I find new songs. But while I drove, I didn’t discover my next embarassing mp3 purchase. Instead, I heard an interview with Enrique Iglesias after Seacrest played the vocalist’s new song “Tonight.” The chorus goes like this:

Here’s the situation / Been to every nation / Nobody’s ever made me feel the way that you do / You know my motivation / Given my reputation / Please excuse me, I don’t mean to be rude / But tonight I’m loving you.

I have long had little to no reason to assume my value system meshes with that of any of today’s pop song writers, so I was pretty sure “tonight I’m loving you” was pretty edited. In Seacrest’s interview with Iglesias, I learned I was right. In the explicit version of the song, “tonight I’m loving you” is “tonight I’m f***ing you.” Seacrest explored the effects of the song’s shock value with Iglesias. He asked what the vocalist’s family thinks of it. His grandma sings it around the house, he said. And his college-aged little sisters love it, and he’s fine with that, he said, but on one condition.

“As long as no guys sing it to them.”

While he’s pretty clearly crackin’ a joke, I am sure — as the sister of my own brother — he’s only half kidding. And since I don’t know Enrique, I also don’t know how likely he actually is to go up to a new girl to say something like “By the way, I’ll be f***ing you tonight.” What I do know is that the song, like lots you’ll hear on the radio, wraps a destructive message in a pop package. It permits the practice of lust which, in the words of Jason Evert, “can’t wait to get” while “love can wait to give.” And these songs, through speakers and ear buds, are delivered directly to a generation whose culture cares far more about making a profit than it does about a person’s wellbeing. And the things done and said to get us to spend our money are so embedded in our culture that we see right past the ploy and buy into it.

This is why women buy tickets to see rappers like Eminem despite lyrics like “If she ever tries to f***ing leave again, I’ma tie her to the bed and set the house on fire.” It’s why there are more guys who objectify women than there are people who set them straight. It’s why Enrique Iglesias, whether for real or solely in a song for profit, can sing a song that says “please excuse me, I don’t mean to be rude” for treating a woman like she’s a penis receptacle, and then say other guys better not do it to his sisters.

It is rude. And there is no excuse.

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Forgiveness.

Over winter break, I watched a movie called Amish Grace for the third time. And for the third time, I wept while I watched it.

This is partly because it’s a Lifetime movie and I cry during appx. 55% of Lifetime movies. (Don’t judge me.) But it’s mostly because it’s based on a book I finished reading last week that is based on a true story that moves most of the people who hear it.

On the morning of Oct. 2, 2006, a 32-year-old man named Charles Carl Roberts IV backed a pickup truck up to the front of an Amish schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, Penn. Inside, the book says, students said the Lord’s Prayer and sang songs before their teacher taught them. Roberts, who the students likely recognized as a local, non-Amish milk truck driver, went in with a plan and a set of guns. Out of veangence toward God for a death in his family, he shot 10 students. Then he shot himself. He and five girls died.

News of the tragedy spread quickly. The world grieved with the Amish and wondered how anyone dared violently intrude on the peculiar world of a peaceful people. In the hours after “the Happening,” which is what the Amish people in Nickel Mines call the shooting, law enforcement officers investigated. Journalists reported. Five girls fought for life in hospitals. While it went on, some Amish people paid a visit to the house nearby where Roberts had lived, to have a word with his widow and parents.

They could have started a shouting match and threatened revenge, insulted the shooter’s name or spit in the faces of his family. They could have, but they didn’t. They expressed forgiveness for Roberts and sympathy for his family’s loss. A few days later, they — including parents of some of the girls who died — went to his funeral.

The authors of Amish Grace explored the Amish community’s countercultural ability to forgive. They dissected the mercy in effort to detect whether it’s possible or just an act. It, they discovered, is possible. And in Amish culture, it isn’t uncommon.

One of many stories that prove it in the book is about a 17-year-old, non-Amish boy in the 1990s. He, who lived in Lancaster County, Penn., sped up a hill on a quiet road in a fast car. When he came over the top of the hill, he came upon a horse and buggy, occupied by a young, newlywed Amish couple coming home from their honeymoon. The boy decided to pass the buggy rather than slam on his brakes. And as he began to barrel by it in the lane beside it, the buggy turned in front of him. When it and his car collided, the woman in the buggy died.

Days after the accident, the woman’s family asked the boy to come to their home for the woman’s wake. He did. What happened that day and afterward is unheard of almost anywhere else. The woman’s family, including her widower, hugged him and forgave him. They cried together. Then, they kept in touch. In each year after, they shared meals and conversation. The boy became a man who got married. When he did, members of the Amish family were guests at his wedding. The man helped his Amish friends when they needed it. The Amish helped fund a mission trip the man took with his wife. To this day, the families are close.

This, in the same United States where we hold a grudge against the guy in line in front of us if he pays for his food with a check. Where blood boils all day because the person who delivers our newspaper didn’t show up. Where “if only we knew where the guy lived” who put the ding in our driver’s side door. Where we berate and belittle servers in restaurants when what we get isn’t what we ordered.

Forgiveness, wrote the authors of Amish Grace, is “deeply woven into the fabric of Amish life” and “inspiring as it is, is not easily transferable to other people in other situations … How does one imitate a habit that’s embedded in a way of life anchored in a five-hundred-year history?”

I don’t have the answer. But forgiveness, once said Martin Luther King, Jr., is “not an occasional act. It is a permanent attitude.”

It is an attitude I want to see us adopt. To learn more about the book Amish Grace, click here.

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“Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior”

According to Yale Law professor Amy Chua, Chinese mothers are superior to western ones.

“A lot of people wonder how Chinese parents raise such stereotypically successful kids,” she said in an essay that appeared in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal. “They wonder what these parents do to produce so many math whizzes and music prodigies, what it’s like inside the family, and whether they could do it too. Well, I can tell them, because I’ve done it. Here are some things my daughters, Sophia and Louisa, were never allowed to do:

• attend a sleepover

• have a playdate

• be in a school play

• complain about not being in a school play

• watch TV or play computer games

• choose their own extracurricular activities

• get any grade less than an A

• not be the No. 1 student in every subject except gym and drama

• play any instrument other than the piano or violin

• not play the piano or violin.”

In the essay, an excerpt from her new book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, Chua uses the phrase “Chinese mothers” loosely. She’d say the way of a “strict” western parent pales in comparison to the strictness of authoritarian Chinese mothers who, for the record, aren’t necessarily from China. In the west, she said, parents are obsessed with self esteem. They assume their children are fragile. Chinese mothers, she said, assume their children are strong. In effort to assure that her children are the best and that they grow up to be people like Yale Law professors, a Chinese mother demands perfection via “rote repition,” hours of practicing musical instruments and hours of practice academic tests. Additionally, Chua says that in the process, Chinese parents can get away with what western ones can’t. A Chinese mother, for instance, can call her kid a fatty if he or she is overweight. She can call her daughter garbage if the kid disrespects her at a dinner party and she can revoke her daughter’s right to get up from the piano bench to go to the bathroom until the song she’s practicing is perfect (true stories!).

Some of the things Chua said make me cringe. And some of the things that make me cringe also make sense (which is alarming).

I’m neither Chinese, nor a mother, but I can say with certainty that I wouldn’t call a kid garbage or fatty. I wouldn’t withhold a kid’s right to go to the bathroom. But for her kids, it works. It also worked for Chua, and without any lasting emotional scars or mental illnesses (so she says).

Last night, I finished reading the book Amish Grace (this will be relevant shortly). It’s about the shooting at that Amish schoolhouse in Pennsylvania in 2006. Hours after the shooting, people from the Amish community visted the wife and parents of the shooter (who killed himself after he shot 10 Amish girls, half of whom died). They expressed forgiveness for what the shooter had done and offered sympathy for his family’s loss. Later that week, several Amish people went to the shooter’s funeral, including some of the parents of girls who died. The media bombarded the public with the story of grace and for the most part, it moved people all over the country. When approached by the media, the Amish people were taken aback that the non-Amish were taken aback by something so average in Amish culture. Forgiveness is a given. There is no grudge. The writers of the book, who are experts in Amish culture, delved more deeply into what happened, and they warn: “…the fact that forgiveness is so deeply woven into the fabric of Amish life should alert us that their example, inspiring as it is, is not easily transferable to other people in other situations. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but how does one imitate a habit that’s embedded in a way of life anchored in a five-hundred-year history?”

There is a lot embedded in Amish life, like no TV and no driving and no mall shopping trips. These are rules, for lack of a better term, that if imposed upon non-Amish American kids would provoke an unending series of temper tantrums. But an Amish kid would never respond that way.

I think the “Chinese motherhood” Chua writes about is embedded in that culture in the same way forgiveness and no TV are embedded in Amish culture. As a result, if you live in that culture, or if that culture is lived in your house and family, an Amish kid doesn’t have a tantrum because he or she can’t watch TV. You may not be emotionally scarred if your mom calls you garbage in Chua’s culture (although I’d like to see some studies on the mental health of adults who grew up with “Chinese mothers”). But even though thanks to the culture in which I grew up part of me wants to fight Chua on behalf of her kids, I’m compelled to partly defend her because westerners really are obsessed with self esteem, and to a fault.

My favorite quote from Chua’s essay is as follows:

“What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you’re good at it. To get good at anything you have to work, and children on their own never want to work, which is why it is crucial to override their preferences.”

When you live in a culture where everybody gets a trophy, including the kids on a losing team, you learn to expect rewards regardless of how good you are at what you do. You learn not to work harder (it’s still fun when you aren’t good at something but you get a trophy for it anyway). You believe you must enjoy everything you do, including all the things you have to do between high school and meeting goals like getting your dream job. And then you become an adult who doesn’t want to do anything.

The western assumption of fragility over strength is probably what causes western kids to be so fragile. In fact, in the human growth and development class I took a year ago, I learned that if you shield infants and kids from stressful experiences, the part of the brain that buffers stress won’t fully develop and the kid won’t have the ability to cope with stress for the rest of his or her life.

But is causing stress in the life of your kid the right way to prevent that? I have a hunch that it isn’t.

I also have a hunch that there are plenty of Yale Law professors who didn’t grow up with “Chinese mothers.”

To read Chua’s story in full, click here. (And thanks to Alex for bringing it to my attention!)