Kiss
I like to think of myself as a smart person. However, I’m also aware that 65% of people think they are smarter than the average person, which is a statistical impossibility, so there’s this whole other side of me that thinks I’m just an idiot. As I said, I “like” to think I’m a smart person, because it hurts less than thinking I’m an imposter.
There’s a term that I recently learned called the “Dunning-Kruger Effect”, which basically describes why some people think they know everything when they really have no idea what’s going on. If you’ve ever been around a pre-teen, you know exactly what I’m talking about. After a 30 second YouTube video they suddenly know everything there is to know about driving, quantum physics, or investing. There’s a fun little graph that goes alongside the Dunning-Kruger effect. My favorite part isn’t the peak of Mount Stupid (even though I laugh every time I see it) but rather the Valley of Despair. As weird as that may sound, it just resonates with me because I’ve been there so many times. It’s that moment where you just want to throw your hands up and quit because it gets too hard.
As you learn more, you suddenly realize that there is so much more that you don’t know. As our circle of knowledge increases, so does the edge of that circle that touches what we don’t know. And at a certain point, our circle becomes so large that we forget that some core principles were hard fought for and learned.
Karl Barth is probably the most influential theologian of the 20th century. I had the “privilege” of reading seven of his Church of Dogmatics for one of my college courses. Literally thousands of pages explaining God, the Word of God, creation, and reconciliation. His footnotes alone take up thousands of pages. But he was able to sum up everything about his theology in one simple sentence that was turned into a children’s song. “Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”
When it comes to reading Barth, I still feel like I’m swelling in the valley of despair. But he did something incredible when he was able to boil it all down to one sentence. In a way, he reminds of when Jesus was asked to sum up all the law and the prophets and he replied with “Love the lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength” and “Love your neighbor as yourself”. Jesus took hundreds of commands, thousands of years of his people’s history, and communicated it’s essence in two easy to understand sentences.
I look at these examples and think “Anyone could have come up with that”, but that’s exactly what makes them so genius. Anyone can understand what they mean. They have taken some of the most complex things and made them easily accessible for everyone. I don’t know if it’s more art or skill to be able to do this, but I know that I want to be able to do that with everything. While on a youth white water rafting trip, our guide asked our kids “What is the Gospel”. After several of them tried extremely hard to give super complicated and accurate answers, one of the youngest girls on the trip spoke up and said “Isn’t it like John 3:16? For God so loved the world that he gave his son?”
There were few moments that made me prouder as a youth pastor than that one. She got it. She was able to take all of the stuff that we tend to overcomplicate it, process it, and come up with the simple answer. When someone asks you why you believe in Jesus, you don’t have to give them a complicated answer. In fact, if you do, you’ll probably end up scaring them away or intimidating them. Instead, keep it simple. Maybe you share a story about when God did something incredible in your life, but keep it to only 3 or 4 sentences. Before God acted my life was like this. God did this. Now my life has changed and is like this. If they want more information, they will certainly ask. Maybe you don’t feel like you have a compelling story, so you just share one or two sentences about why you believe. If you get into a whole apologetics argument they’ll tune you out.
It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking we know everything, but the truth is that the more we learn, the more we will realize how much we don’t know. And so we strive for deeper understanding and somewhere along the line we forget that not everyone has the same background we have. We have to be able to take the knowledge we have gained and be communicate it to others in a way that they can understand, even if they’re in the valley of despair. It’s often the simplest answers that have the greatest impact.