A Thought for Today
by Terrell Tebbetts
Thanks for your thoughtful letter. I know you shared the changes in your life in order to get my thinking on them. I hope I’m as thoughtful in my letter as you are in yours. First, I’m happy you’ve found a job where you use your education. As your tech firm’s coordinator of educational workshops, you’re using the critical thinking and communications skills you developed as an English major. Though we both know you have the book-smarts to pursue advanced degrees, we’re agreed that there’s no reason to do so if you enjoy the work you’ve found. God doesn’t give us intelligence only to make us graduate students. He gives us intelligence to work in every field. Second, I’m also happy you still “process ideas” and come up with a “continuing chain of ‘Aha!’ moments.” I’m even happier this still gives you “more joy than just about anything else in life.” As you know, I love having such ‘Aha!’ moments myself, moments when I understand something at last or see something from a whole new angle. God gave us good minds and wants us to use them. I’m sure He too finds joy in seeing our Aha! moments. Third, I’m a little saddened to find you’re suspecting you “might not be cut out to get married and have a family.” I know you may be right, of course. Not everyone is so made. But I have one question for you to think about. Could it be your good analytic intelligence has become a hindrance? Has it become the only tool you use on every matter you deal with, in neglect of other forms of intelligence? In other words, are you gradually becoming like a carpenter who’s so good at using a hammer that he tries to use it on every single carpentry job, even when he needs a screwdriver? After all, critical thinking is just one form of intelligence. We all have other forms too—social intelligence, for example, which we use in living and working with other people, and emotional intelligence, which attunes our feelings appropriately as we deal with people and events. When Obi Wan Kenobi tells Luke Skywalker to turn off his computer and “trust your feelings,” he gives advice you may need. Finally, I’m distressed at only one matter you shared. You say you’ve had a “crisis of spirituality” and have become agnostic. Are you dismissing another form of intelligence—your spiritual intelligence, that part of us that navigates unseen realities, guiding us, as Wordsworth wrote, as we “move about in worlds not realized”? Has your intellectual power become a tyrant, like Blake’s mythological Urizen, suppressing your spiritual power? I just hope your crisis will resolve itself in the greatest Aha! Moment any man can have—a fuller faith in the God who made, loves, and saves us.
Terrell Tebbetts is the Martha Heasley Cox Chair in American Literature at Lyon College. He can be reached at [email protected]. gg
