Talking

I taught 7th and 8th grade last Friday. It was fun. They liked me and I liked them. We got everything done that we needed to and I only needed to remind them of what they were supposed to be doing, and they did it, usually. If you don't include talking all the time, they did it. But I understand the need to talk to help make sense of the world, so I tried to give them time to talk. It was then difficult to say, "OK guys, you can talk in 5 mins. Now just finish up your assignments." It would only be a matter of seconds before I would need to remind them that they really didn't need to discuss the latest thought that came into their brains, but that it would keep until the 5 minutes were up. But, as I said, sometimes we need to talk in order to make sense of our world.

That is the reason I have struggled with writing for so long. I think that if I write it, it must be figured out. So I must talk about it first. Then once I have figured it out, I don't think about writing it down. Today I wrote about interacting with the Fine Arts from a Christian perspective. I was making a logical argument against certain positions that I must deal with. But as I was writing I realized that it didn't much matter how logical my arguments were; they would never change the mind of people because they disagree with some of my basic presuppositions. But I wrote it down anyway because I couldn't talk about it.

I haven't written about some things. There are just certain thoughts, dreams, ideas, and experiences that I don't trust myself to commit to paper. They are too crazy or too insignificant or too sacred to know where to begin. So they float around in my brain and sometimes come out in my conversations with Thomas, but they will have to remain unpreserved words for now. Maybe until I talk about them more.