[SPEAKER_01]: A feeding them out parents, this is Dr. Kim.
[SPEAKER_01]: I hope your summer is going well.
[SPEAKER_01]: As a treat, this week and next week will be playing two parts of an interview that I did with Dr. Kelly Cappick, a theologian who wrote the great book, Your Only Human.
[SPEAKER_01]: And as you'll hear in the interview, it immediately made me think of parents.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I hope this will be a reminder to you about what you expect from yourself, and certainly how God sees you and what he expects from you in parenting.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, enjoy this week and next week.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thanks.
[SPEAKER_02]: Hey everybody, this is Dr. Ken, and today I have with me Kelly Capic, who is professor at Covenant College, which is in Georgia, and he'll tell us a little more about that.
[SPEAKER_02]: But Met Kelly, when he came to my Anglican Church months ago for a conference on his book, which is titled, Your Only Human.
[SPEAKER_02]: how your limits reflect God's design and why that's good news.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I got to tell you, you know, it's a really good book.
[SPEAKER_02]: But some authors are not really good speakers.
[SPEAKER_02]: But Kelly, when you came, you know, you're a professor and you can tell a guy that knows how to keep his young, distracted students' attention.
[SPEAKER_02]: I really enjoyed the conference.
[SPEAKER_02]: It was very eye-opening.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's very kind of the content, some of the content.
[SPEAKER_02]: So you've written before, what was it that kind of got you to, I really need to focus on the year-only human part?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, there are some theological motivations behind it and some personal ones.
[SPEAKER_00]: We could export or either both, but on the personal side,
[SPEAKER_00]: One part is just my own dealing with the sense of at night, even almost every night or day, it's like, why didn't you get more done, Kelly?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, sense of feeling of guilt and shame, like I should have done more.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so me thinking through that and wrestling through what does God actually want me?
[SPEAKER_00]: What are my expectations for me?
[SPEAKER_00]: And we don't tend to think that way?
[SPEAKER_00]: No, we don't.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I think we think, oh, God's gracious in loving, but then you're, if you stretch a scratch below the surface, like, why do I feel like I have to be everywhere and do everything and no answers for all these things?
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, for me, it was wrestling with what how much do I need to do and what is faithfulness look like kind of reframing it?
[SPEAKER_00]: And then the second part, the second personal part that's a longer story, we don't need to go into now, but
[SPEAKER_00]: My wife and I got married in 1993 and in the summer or in 2008, my wife got cancer, a rare form of cancer normally, much older women get it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And long story short, she was declared cancer free about a year later and then in 2010, she called me from the side of the road in the summer and her leg wasn't working right.
[SPEAKER_00]: And from that day to this day,
[SPEAKER_00]: She deals with daily chronic pain and fatigue and took us six years to get the male clinic and figure out some of what's going on But there's no answer so all that to say so I ended up a grant came out of nowhere from the temple then foundation and with her encouragement a wrote a book on pain and suffering
[SPEAKER_00]: called embodied hope.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it was only after finally wrestling through lament and really being honest about paying the suffering.
[SPEAKER_00]: I felt ready to write about the goodness of being a human including our limits.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's really shiny then because that embodied hope that's a award-winning book.
[SPEAKER_02]: And this is like after that difficult learning process, what you come out of it is the hope of
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, yeah, part of it was my wife and I are kind of high achievers and thought, you know, she had run into this organization and we thought, well, with cancer, we had to cut down a lot and cut down and then, and then, and then with chronic pain also, and it's like, oh, we still don't have margin.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so that brought on all these feelings of shame, like shouldn't we be doing more?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_00]: Which prepared us to do the research and thinking about this idea of
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe our limits aren't all bad.
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe this is part of how God made us.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's something I've actually been thinking about for 20 years, but this was finally the impetus, and it was time for me to finally work on it.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, I think that's such an important story is to how you got here because, you know, there's such an idea of,
[SPEAKER_02]: that maybe what you're talking about in your book, your only human is just another thing to add on to all the stuff that I need to know.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think what you're saying is, no, no, this is part of a difficult journey.
[SPEAKER_02]: I always say half of wisdom is just getting tired.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, just when I was younger, I'd think, you know, I'm going to be distant, and it's like, no, I'm not.
[SPEAKER_02]: And the suffering we go through helps to fiddle that down.
[SPEAKER_02]: I think that's really important.
[SPEAKER_02]: story of how you wrote this.
[SPEAKER_02]: But, you know, when you were talking, one of the things that I kept thinking about as parents, and even the term parenting is just such a new and burdensome idea.
[SPEAKER_02]: And parents are constantly lamenting together that we we'd do.
[SPEAKER_02]: never know if we're doing it right we always feel like we need to be doing more and you made some reference to that and say more about what you know what you hope particularly that kind of message because your kids are just you're just being done with your kids and learn a lot from that as well what what is it we need to know as parents about the limitations and the good part about our limitations.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and you know obviously I guess that's why we're having this conversation because there is so much you could say, but maybe to start us off.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean some of it is
[SPEAKER_00]: There are just tremendous pressures right now on parents and kids little kids starting a little like your kid needs to be in many sports and yes and they should be learning many instruments and many languages and it and it becomes funny and we laugh about it, but then you know I've spoken here.
[SPEAKER_00]: UBA, for example, in parents are like, they're seriously stressed if their kid doesn't get into the right kindergarten.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's right.
[SPEAKER_00]: And now I've heard that on different parts of the country, that's actually more common than people realize.
[SPEAKER_00]: And people are like, well, I know it sounds funny, but if they don't get into that school, then they're not getting into this proper elementary school.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then they're not going to get into the high school.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then they're not going to get into college.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's just tremendous amount of pressure.
[SPEAKER_00]: And even, you know, the sense of,
[SPEAKER_00]: how good kids should be at everything.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so we lied to them a lot and say like, you're an amazing soccer player.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're not a very good soccer player.
[SPEAKER_00]: And as a college professor, we deal with this on a regular basis because for some kids, most of the time they've learned it before they've gotten here, but sometimes it's, they've been told they're amazing their whole lives and they're, it's not that they're bad but they're just, I mean, you only get one winner in anything, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: But if you've been told that you're amazing,
[SPEAKER_00]: Actually, a lot of people here are more beautiful than me and they're smarter than I am and they're more athletic than me, that unravels your world if you haven't been prepared.
[SPEAKER_02]: There's an insecurity that comes with that kind of your good at everything that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, because it's also just a lie.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean part of part of my encouragement for parents is actually.
[SPEAKER_00]: cultivating and leaning into this idea of our finitude as a positive.
[SPEAKER_00]: And maybe we just actually need a pause because that may not mean anything to some of the listeners.
[SPEAKER_00]: Finitude is a fancy word.
[SPEAKER_00]: It just means limits, limits in time, space, knowledge and power.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the basic, it's a fancy way of saying what Christians have always called just being a creature.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the fundamental idea is God made us as creatures with limits.
[SPEAKER_00]: And those limits aren't a result of sin in the fall.
[SPEAKER_00]: They are there from the beginning, because we were never meant to be God.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're meant to be creatures.
[SPEAKER_00]: And God's comfortable being God.
[SPEAKER_00]: And He's comfortable with us being creatures.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's not really a trouble.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I wrote that down.
[SPEAKER_02]: Finitude is not sin.
[SPEAKER_02]: Was one of the big things I came with with that.
[SPEAKER_02]: And even you mentioned specifically in your book, you said, we need to stop asking or feeling that we should ask for God's forgiveness when we can't do everything.
[SPEAKER_02]: And we need to ask forgiveness forever, imagining we could.
[SPEAKER_02]: Say more about that like, you know, we think about the guilt we feel that I probably haven't done enough and all that, but you're talking about
[SPEAKER_02]: pride-based sin is actually confessing that I think I should be doing all that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and we never tend to think about it that way.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's hard.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm sometimes I'm trying to just put words to things we feel but haven't thought about and haven't articulated.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so
[SPEAKER_00]: one of the counterintuitive realities of feeling like my kid needs to be at all of these events and I need to read all of these books and I need to be participating in this event and that event and doing this and that well if I say hey can you be everywhere at once we laugh and say no can you know everything we laugh and say no but actually the guilt betrays effect
[SPEAKER_00]: The shame portrays, in fact, we actually do think we should be able to be everywhere.
[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly with the shame.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, and we never would, if I ask, do you think your God, we all say that's silly.
[SPEAKER_00]: Of course, I don't think I'm God, but we do.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_00]: And God, and what's interesting is when we feel guilty that we're not God, and he never wanted us to be God.
[SPEAKER_00]: We know, it doesn't expect us to be God, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: We can grow, we can learn, we can say, no to things and not be bad people, because
[SPEAKER_00]: He made us with limits.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's not a bad thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's where we get our particularity and differences.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's why we need each other.
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now that's exactly where I was thinking about is that number one, when you talk about kind of naming the feelings we have inside, that's what we shrinks do.
[SPEAKER_02]: And in a common part of a Christian psychologist work that it's kind of a spiritual director.
[SPEAKER_02]: is differentiating the voices in your head, you know, people say, well, Dr. Wilkes, God knows he's hit my attention, he's got to hit me over the head with the two by four.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I'm like, when did Jesus ever smack anyone over the head with the two by four?
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, we have these voices that are the sense of, that's a good thing.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I feel bad that I don't do it, but we never step back to think, is that really what God is asking of us?
[SPEAKER_02]: And especially this
[SPEAKER_02]: So before I go to that, I thought about that on the parenting, but we kind of are putting a lot of this on our children, aren't we?
[SPEAKER_02]: I think you talked about the standard, at least by high school sort of academic schedule.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think you said it's kind of how we catacize our teenagers.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: You say more about because you see college kids and what the result of that is.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, thanks.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, some of the research for this book, I didn't plan on doing with studying
[SPEAKER_00]: but at the time during part of it, you know, I had kids in high school and just recognizing and seeing this is all over the country.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I should say it's primarily in middle upper middle class public and private schools.
[SPEAKER_00]: If it's a different socio-economics, this doesn't actually always fit and there's some different challenges.
[SPEAKER_00]: But in a lot of those middle upper middle classes, schools, including public schools, the normal day starts at like 7.30, kids leaving the house, rushing off and earlier
[SPEAKER_00]: They changed and then they're doing some extracurricular activity could be robotics theater or a sport, they do that till about six, six, thirty, they rush home.
[SPEAKER_00]: Shubs some food in their mouth, make a quick shower, and then they're doing another extracurricular activity or homework till about 11 every night.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and they're going going and.
[SPEAKER_00]: The reason why I call it catacizing is you do that for four year straight, you are being shaped.
[SPEAKER_00]: You are being formed.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so what's happened is I don't even think we've realized we just think, of course they do that.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's high school.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's what you should do.
[SPEAKER_00]: But you're now being shaped and then a college where I do, we continue that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so by the time you graduate college, you have been shaped to constantly be going and doing.
[SPEAKER_00]: And part of what's interesting and part of what we're now dealing with is all of the ways the coping mechanisms that we're employing to try and deal with this very unrealistic pace.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, yes.
[SPEAKER_00]: So whether it's the smart phone and we blame technology or the Netflix binges, we tend to blame technology for for these problems, but actually I I now think
[SPEAKER_00]: The reason you and I check our smartphones constantly, part of it is because if we allow moments of silence when we're not doing anything, we'll be flooded with the shame that we should be doing something.
[SPEAKER_00]: So if you can just keep yourself distracted, that's why we enjoy the Netflix binges, but as soon as it ends, ask most people, three and a half hours is are done, but as soon as it ends they're flooded with.
[SPEAKER_00]: I wasted my time because we are endless to do is right now.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's what I'm interested in exploring that.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, it's interesting because it's almost a sub-level of the shame cycle that of addiction, that if I finish the thing I feel bad that I did and then I feel all the shame, the best way to get rid of that shame is to go back into the distraction and whatever.
[SPEAKER_02]: One thing I didn't get a chance to ask you, with another you brought up technology, do you have any thoughts about, I don't remember about the, you know, technology often gives us the illusion of being able to do everything.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: With this information, I can supposedly have it my fingertips.
[SPEAKER_02]: And you mentioned how, you know, that's not the same as knowing what's really relevant and being able to know it all.
[SPEAKER_02]: Do you see,
[SPEAKER_02]: sort of the good and the bad of some of that technology tool and ways that maybe we can kind of rethink how to limit see the limits that really are there on this tool seems to make it look like we can know everything.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean there are lots to say on that aren't there because
[SPEAKER_00]: For example, I mean, this isn't, you know, we're not going to spend our time going use this app.
[SPEAKER_00]: Don't use that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
[SPEAKER_00]: We do often.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm more interested in a sense of how our imaginations are being shaped.
[SPEAKER_00]: your imagination is shaped by working with animals with, you know, the speed of a horse-led carriage.
[SPEAKER_00]: That kind of thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like you can only go so fast.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can only cover so much distance.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can only, you know, the...
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, Wittenberg press in the 16th century was amazing, started to make, you know, you get books everywhere, but it still took forever to actually put the letters down and all of that kind of nature.
[SPEAKER_00]: So now part of what's interesting is just because of what we would rub shoulders with, our imaginations were more shaped by what you might think of as the organic world or something animals.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
[SPEAKER_00]: That kind of thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: But now our imaginations are so shaped by like the foam in our pocket, the airplane, the cloud, all of these things communicate to us.
[SPEAKER_00]: ever expanding and quickening speeds, expanding knowledge, et cetera.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so kind of the sad irony or funny part is that for ever, we thought it was really cool to try and make robots like humans.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: But now the paradox is what's happened is we think humans should be like robot.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that's exactly right.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we can feel how dehumanizing it is because we can't keep up.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is just it's not just like about the problems of pornography or this it's it's our whole imaginations and ways of inhabiting the world are being shaped.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and so that's part of where I think there are some deeper things that we need to think about.
[SPEAKER_00]: And part of where I'm trying to get at is Christians have not responded very different from non-Christians to this problem of exhaustion because both non-Christians and Christians try and hint at the same way right now.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that is better time management.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, yes.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm trying in my the whole book is basically saying it's not fundamentally a time management problem.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a theological and pastoral problem.
[SPEAKER_00]: We have to re-understand who God is and how he expects us to inhabit his world.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, that's really good.
[SPEAKER_01]: So we'll leave this interview there and join us next week for the second part of this two-part interview with Dr. Kelly Capy.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thanks.