I know this problem well. It’s one that I often speak against in course designs, meeting agendas, and other organizational contexts. You’re trying to do too many things and so you’re not doing any of them well.

The last day of my job was two weeks ago now, and I had high ambitions for what I would produce in the time I freed up. And I have disciplined myself to try and cut things out, to try and focus my attentions so I can produce things worth sharing.

But I’m guilty of not heeding my own advice. I still haven’t narrowed the focus enough.

Of course, it’s only my advice because I find myself repeating it. I first heard it from Andy Stanley and then went a whole lot deeper with Chris McChesney. But it’s harder when you’re the one alone with your ideas and you’re excited about all of them. How do you give yourself the emotional distance to focus on what’s most important?

Sometimes I do what all the TV shows I watched as a kid told me and use my imagination. Imagine someone like me with dreams in his heart came to me and asked for help. What would I say? Sometimes this actually works well. It’s easier to be the villain when I pretend they’re someone else’s dreams.

Normally I have these conversations in the context of an organization that is already set up and doing something. The scope has been narrowed to some degree and just needs a tune-up. I’m finding that starting with a blank slate is much more difficult.

I’ve narrowed down my mission: I resonate with Ephesians 4, where it says that God gave teachers (among others) to the church in order to equip the saints for the work of the ministry. I believe that’s my calling. Based on my personality and passions (and blisters), I’ve narrowed down three core, interrelated practices: learn, create, help. Based on my training and experience, I’ve focused my work on adult Christian education with an eye toward worldview integration. By “integration” what I really mean is “desecularizing” or what Kevin Vanhoozer would call “remythologizing.”

But these are still really big ideas. Who is my audience? Just when I think I have that narrowed down, I find myself concerned to address people outside that audience. Does this mean I’ve identified the wrong group? Or do I need to trust the decision and let a whole lot of other things go? Easier said than done.

Much of my work keeps me in the relationships between faith and reason, between Christ and culture, and between belief and practice. These are still mammoth subjects. You can fit anything in there. (That’s part of what attracts me to them.)

Then there’s the fact that whatever I define for myself professionally, I still have hobbies and, far more importantly, family responsibilities to attend to. So if I can only narrow the focus to three things in each area, I’m doing well—until I do the math and find myself chasing nine goals instead of three.

One of the keys is to remember that it’s not now-or-never. Good things can wait. They always do.

I also have to keep in mind that I may pick the “wrong” first thing. In fact, I’m sure I will. With something this new and open, with the goals still being refined, the strategy will be imperfect. It will be refined with time. As long as I pick something worth doing at all, it won’t be a waste.

Narrowing the focus requires ruthless realism. You can’t spend too much time lamenting all the good things you’re walking away from. You have to embrace with joy the one thing you get to say “yes” to. Then do it with all of your might. (Just make sure you don’t say “wait” to things like time with your family and doing the dishes.)

This morning I had the opportunity to share a little bit with our Men’s Ministry at church, and the subject I chose was trust. A few weeks ago, I found myself listening to some Simon Sinek talks while I did household chores. One of the things he said that struck me was something to the effect that people do their best work in an environment of trust.

This wasn’t an entirely new subject to me. As a teacher and course designer, I know that belonging and safety are important elements for helping students thrive. Trust is implied. It’s not a trust that says you will never correct me, but a trust that says when you do, it’s because I have your back.

I’ve also been taken advantage of in the past as a generally trusting person. Trust makes you vulnerable, and if you give it to the wrong person, you can get seriously hurt.

But it struck me anew this time for two reasons. First of all, the level of trust in our public discourse is practically nonexistent. It seems no matter what you say or post on social media, someone is ready to pounce and tell you why you’re wrong. Worse yet, I am that person sometimes! People share some of the silliest things, and they get defensive if you try and show them where the lie or mistake is. The circle of trust is tight, and few are inside. Everyone outside simply cannot be heard.

So that’s a huge problem. But then I’ve been in too many churches and Christian organizations where trust is in short supply. We are on guard. And there are definitely things we should guard against. But at a certain point the kind of safety that could promote trust goes too far and makes it unsafe. Call it paranoia.

I wonder if there’s a pattern here. I wonder if conservative churches and organizations are more prone to paranoia. I wonder whether fundamentalists and their heirs have it worse, since they already have a pattern of separation over values. (I think the article “Machen’s Warrior Children” has something to say about this, if I recall.) If my values may require me to reject you, how can I build an environment of trust? How can we do our best work together?

I didn’t talk about any of that this morning. I focused on how great it is to have friends I can trust, and how that bond has saved me from making some significant mistakes in my life. But I’m convinced that this is a necessary element for discipleship, and maybe society in general. How can we build trust? How do we earn it? How do we know when to extend it to others?

It has to be more than a common enemy. We need shared values. But how can we come to an agreement if we don’t trust each other enough to at least listen and take one another seriously? In other words, what if the trust has already been broken? How do we rebuild it then?

This is why I’m intrigued with the conservative experience on this front, because I am one. I have a pattern of rejecting people who refuse to repent of beliefs I find destructive. Is my tolerance level set too low? Probably. And yet I find myself wishing I spoke up more often. If complete agreement and lack of conflict are necessary ingredients, then I don’t see a way forward. What does this leave? Taking doctrine less seriously? Shrugging at sin?

No, I’m not satisfied with any of these answers. There has to be a way to passionately pursue different beliefs while still having my neighbor’s back.

Nothing like a snow day (and the 4 rascals that come with it in our home) to challenge one’s plans. One of the reasons I wanted to scale back at work was to research more and write more. Stop coasting on my theological education and start pushing myself again.

But another reason was to spend more time at home, both around the home and with the kids. I have a stack of parenting books on the shelf behind me and I have plans of reading them and graduating to super-parent. But I hadn’t cracked any of them yet, so it was just an average parenting day.

Right now my parenting philosophy is something like this: don’t screw up.

There’s more to it than that, of course, but you’ll notice the not-so-faint odor of fear here. I used to use my kids as the proof of my spirituality, so every mistake they made was a reflection on me. If I’m called to ministry but my kids are animals, then they are the obstacle keeping me from God’s will.

That’s an absolutely terrible parenting approach, by the way. A great way to make everything worse for everyone. I do not recommend.

Right now I don’t have a ton of explicit goals or strategies. My approach is basically (1) try to be a virtuous person, (2) love them like crazy, and (3) try to help them rise to the challenges of the moment.

(Between the last sentence and the present one, I was called to break up a dispute in the girls’ room because my wife is trying to put our baby to sleep. We are in the thick of it, at least in the “young family” sense of the term. I’ve been awake since 4:20am. This is all very normal these days.)

I’m sure I have many weaknesses as a parent, but impatience is undoubtedly one of them. Kids appear to learn character much more slowly than they learn how to count. But in my mind, the essence of love is a commitment to the long climb. It’s not a race. The only thing that matters is making it to the top together.

Still, time does go quickly, and there is always the fear of “too late.” But I’ve never found being afraid to help a situation. So instead I try to trust it to God’s care and buy another book on the off-chance that I’ll read the right thing just in time.

One of the reasons I wanted to start blogging again is I am troubled by the direction the world is going, and I know I’m not alone in this. I believe I have some of the answers, or at least some of the right cardinal directions.

I’m cringing. That feels like such a pompous thing to say.

But we all have things we believe, and we wouldn’t believe them if we didn’t think they were true, would we? I know some of my beliefs are wrong. I just don’t know which ones. Yet. But that doesn’t mean I must be silent. I don’t have to be omniscient to be helpful, and neither do you.

So how do we know if someone has ideas worth listening to?

I want to sketch out an answer today and fill in the details later. In philosophy, we talk about ways of knowing and sources of truth. If we want to know the truth about something, there’s actually a pretty simple list of places to look.

• Intuition. You can trust your gut, that internal sense of conviction that tells you something is true. You feel it inside, and whether or not you can explain it, sometimes that feeling turns out to be right.
• Reason. You can think carefully about things, and in reflecting on them come up with new insights. They may not be revolutionary, but often they are clarifying, and clarity can make all the difference for yourself and others.
• Sense Experience. You can take in the world through your senses, and that information gives you a wide open window on reality. They may take in your surroundings, information about the people you encounter, and even information about yourself.
• Testimony. You can rely on what someone else has told you. You can’t be everywhere at once, sensing everything, thinking every thought, and having every intuition. You have access to a significant chunk of the world’s knowledge right now through the Internet, but you will never know it all. You have to rely on other people to share with you what they know is true.
• Revelation. Christians usually list revelation as a way of knowing. I tend to think of this as little more than authoritative testimony. If God has spoken (and I believe He has) and if He is the kind of being He claims to me (and I believe He is) then His testimony about Himself, the world, and me is the most trustworthy source of truth.

Now, these sources are not all equal. I believe divine sources of truth are to be preferred over human sources, and sources of truth that are public and commonly held are to be preferred over private experiences. So I end up ranking them like so:

1. Revelation
2. Reason
3. Sense Experience
4. Testimony
5. Intuition

There is much to be said about each of these, and already you may have questions about why I rank things the way that I do. That’s fair. Don’t believe me yet. I haven’t given you any reasons to.

For now, let me just say this: whatever God has revealed is authoritative, so I submit everything else to this on principle. I believe I am responsible to think carefully about all forms of truth, and so reason is necessary right out the gate. I need reason to help me identify what evidence is and what it means. I use reason to understand how to faithfully respond to revelation. My reason isn’t perfect, but it’s what I have to do if I want to take the quest for truth seriously. My experience of the world is also something I’m entrusted with and it’s hard to imagine making sense of anyone’s testimony without taking it into account.

The last two are the trickiest for me. I’m convinced testimony is necessary, and that I must at times set aside my personal experience based on what others have said. Precisely because I can’t know everything, I have to trust other people. The reason it appears to rank so low is because I use the first three to help me determine which testimonies to trust.

As for intuition, I am a very intuitive person, but I want that to take a back seat to everything else. Intuition is more like the icing on the cake than the guts of the thing. It is good, but in proportion and in the right place. In my mind, the one form of intuition that is the most important is the conscience. It is right for me not to take seriously my moral intuitions, even though they may prove to need tweaking.

I think one important step toward a healthy society is to give careful thought to which sources we look to for truth and why. We need to become conscious of how to categorize the information we receive, what we do with it, and why. My list above is in no way the final word. But if you can become more self-conscious about your relationship with the truth, we’re off to a great start.

My name is Josh Vajda, and I am the Wandering Baptist.

I chose this name for myself years ago, as I was trying to decide where I fit after seminary. I originally created this space to be a place to think out loud without worrying about what people thought of me. I signed my posts “WB.”

This year I’ve decided I need a fresh start. I’ve wiped this particular slate clean because I want to go a different route. I’m ready to own the name “Wandering Baptist” and to stand by what I post here. I had another blog that I used for “my” writing on occasion, and I’m repurposing that site as well. My plan is to use that as more of a professional web presence, and to use this space just for writing.

I have so much to say. I don’t know if anyone will be listening, but for right now, that’s ok. I find writing to be a great way to organize my thoughts. I have been very spotty in my blogging past, to say the least, but I have notebooks filled with journal entries. I have to write. I’m just trying to force myself to do it in public.

Why in public? Well, as Seth Godin says, ideas you don’t share can’t help anyone. I don’t know if my ideas will help anyone, but there’s a chance they could, and so I’m ready to find out. And it’s ok if they don’t. Sometimes you have to verify a particular route is a dead end before you can press on.

That’s where the wandering motif comes in. I’ve been a Baptist my whole life, although for most of my life that didn’t mean much of anything. As a kid I thought it meant serious Christian. All those other denominations add to Scripture, but we Baptists keep it real.

Of course, the more people I met, and the more I read, and the more I learned, and the more I reflected, the more it became clear to me that this was not at all the case. What does it mean to be a Baptist when the Holy Spirit continues to work miracles in the world? What does it mean to be a Baptist when there are good Christians in other churches in your town? What does it mean to be a Baptist when “no creed but the Bible” turns out to be a creed? Or when you discover that liturgy is alive and well in your barebones morning service? What does it mean to be Baptist when the Calvinists and Arminians are at each other’s throats? What does it mean to be a Baptist when reading the Bible turns out to be more complicated than you thought? What does it mean to be Baptist when congregational rule and American democracy flourished together? Or when the lead pastor and board of trustees turns out to be a model that you can find in the business world, growing in popularity at the same time? What does it mean to be a Baptist when the Southern Baptist juggernaut finally shows up on your radar?

Yes, there was the “BAPTIST” acronym. I never learned it. As far as I was concerned, I belonged to Christ. I wasn’t interested in someone’s denominational agenda. Maybe that would have helped me along the way, but I don’t know. I doubt it. I needed to wander. Wandering is good, as long as you do it the right way.

“Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it.” Yes. There is that kind of wandering, too. That’s different. This isn’t about wandering away from the faith. It’s about exploring the edges. I just call it “wandering” because it’s been a more or less aimless enterprise. Explorers are on a mission. Explorers are cool.

I am not cool. I was just asking questions.

I want to keep these short, so let me wrap this up. My purpose with this blog, if I have any, is to log my wanderings in public. To share what I’ve learned, in case I’ve learned anything worth sharing. To share where I’m wandering these days in case anyone else is venturing through the same terrain, so we can pool our resources. And I hope, eventually, to use these wanderings to build something better.

Just know, dear reader, that I expect to offend everyone eventually. My non-Baptist readers will probably be annoyed at my Baptist convictions at times. My Baptist readers will probably be annoyed at all the unbaptisty habits I’ve picked up along the way. And then there will be times I genuinely say something stupid and offend everyone. Hopefully by saying it out loud I can learn from my mistakes. Sometimes you need a friend to tell you when you’ve reached that dead end.