This week, Joe asks Jamie about overcoming character flaws to be more effective in ministry and life.
Joe Fontenot: Your name is Jamie Dew.
Jamie Dew: And your name is Joe Fontenot.
Joe: And we would like to welcome you to the Towel & Basin podcast.
Jamie: And we would, and what are we talking about today?
Joe: I'll tell you, Jamie, today I have a-
Jamie: We flipped the script there, by the way.
Joe: We flipped the script.
Jamie: If you've listened to any more than one or two of them, I don't know if you'd call it that, but we flipped the script.
Joe: It was a pretty Ninja move on our part.
Jamie: It was pretty baller.
Joe: So today I'm asking Jamie a very serious question about dealing with character flaws. And specifically-
Jamie: Because I have a lot of them.
Joe: I go to the source. No. Oh man. We're off and running. This is a complete outtake. So I'm asking you about character flaws, and what I want to know is how do you overcome character flaws in your life?
Jamie: So yeah, so lots of ideas. But what do you mean? Give me some examples because I could go in a million directions.
Joe: Right, right, right. So say you grew up without money. This is really with a lot of people, even though so many of us technically might fit into a middle-class, so much of this is relative, right? We grew up without money or we grew up in the lower end, and most of our friends are in the middle to upper end of middle class. You can frame it however you want. That's certainly something that in more of my formative years, I could say is true for me. I did not have a lot of money, or my family didn't have a lot of money when I was very concerned about these things, as a kid.
Joe: And so this has been something, my relationship with money has been something, the understanding of how God blesses us in all of these things. This has been something that I've had to wrestle with and work through, and am still doing in some degree. This is what I'm talking about. How do we overcome this narrative that we've learned to believe about ourselves, overcome these character flaws.
Jamie: Yeah. All right. So that helps. I think first of all we do have to be honest, because there's going to be a lot of folks that just immediately dismiss this question as, "Oh, you grew up poor, cry me a river. It's all up on you. You need to just work hard anyway." And I think the callousness of that response is to somehow think that these types of factors really don't shape us. Okay. But social class does, it is a major shaper of personality, of life approach to careers, to family, to relationships. And so those types of things have a huge, huge impact on the direction people go and their success rates. Just yesterday for example, I was in the state of Georgia visiting with some Baptist folks. And I was over at the Baptist State Convention and talking with those folks. And they made the comment that in the state of Georgia, one of the major indicators that's used to determine how many prisons need to be built are the third grade reading levels of the state.
Jamie: So in other words, they test third graders on what the reading level is. And when they draw the conclusion, X number of our third graders can't read at this level, then that indicates how many prisons they need to build.
Joe: Wow.
Jamie: And when X number can read at this level, then we don't need to build as many prison prisons. So you know that they would not be spending that much money on prisons and things like that if statistically speaking, that indicator were not right. For me personally, look, this shaped me. I wasn't reading well... Gosh. Reading and reading well are two different things in my life, right? So I really wasn't doing much by way of reading until third, fourth, fifth grade. That shaped me very deeply. I wrote off academics and pretty much everything that went along with that.
Jamie: And not just academics, but the life that goes along with that as well. I was a rowdy kid as I've made note before on this podcast and other formats, and got into lots of trouble. Reading well. My gosh, I still don't know if I read well. All kidding aside, I have four children. They're 12 and nine. As I say this in this podcast, at least two of them read faster than I do. And I'm 43 years old. And all that to say, I think we first of all do have to acknowledge that these factors shape. Varying degrees. Every personality is different. Some people are rather recalcitrant, they're impervious, they don't... Those factors just are those, and they still manage to rise above and it's easier for them. But for most people it's not that way. So I think step one is to acknowledge that these things are real factors.
Jamie: How we deal with them, how we respond to them, there's any number of things we could say and just bat around for a minute. We do need to remind ourselves that we are not the sum total of our failures. We're not the sum total of our successes. We're not the sum total of what people say about us. We're not the sum total of our feelings.
Joe: Sometimes I feel like I just need to write those four things down and review them every night.
Jamie: Yeah, because look, if I'm left to my feelings and how I feel about myself, then I'm probably not going to think much. If I'm left to what other people have said about me, that could go in any number of directions. It depends on the day, I guess. If I've done well lately and people like what I've done, man, they might think I'm just the greatest thing in the world.
Jamie: And if I've made a few bad mistakes or I haven't done what people wanted me to do, they might say the most vicious, vile things in the world. And each of those things is true or false to varying degrees. Our critics, the nasty thing about our critics is that they're often nasty. They're often unkind and uncharitable, but there are reasons we get critiqued. And the reasons we get critiqued are in many, if not most, if not all cases, legitimate. As I've said before, I think even on this podcast, sometimes our enemies are the only ones that'll tell us the truth about ourselves. They're the only ones that'll look at you and say, you're arrogant. And I think part of dealing with our character flaws is being able to take those long, hard looks in the mirror. I mean that quite literally in my case, times when I'm just sitting in front of the mirror, maybe brushing my teeth or whatever.
Jamie: I was just peering into my own eyes for a second, asking hard questions, and admitting that there are some deficiencies in what I've done, and being willing to come back and own those things and fix them. So own the fact that some of these things are true. Take steps and take actions to make them right. Own the fact that maybe I did it, or you did it or whatever else. And don't try to disperse that off onto somebody else, deflect it off on somebody else, give pseudo apologies. I'm sorry if your feelings were hurt. Say things like, "I'm sorry that I hurt your feelings." Say things like, "I did that. I'm sorry. I'm sorry." So own those types of things. There is a quote. I've heard this attributed to multiple people.
Jamie: I think it probably comes from Robert Murray McCheyne. And he says for every look that you take it yourself, you take 10 looks at Christ. I'd heard that Richard Baxter said that and he said, for every one look you take at yourself, you take a hundred looks at Christ. But when you do take a look at yourself, take a good look. And his point would be to say, man, be honest with what's really there, as I was just saying a minute about staring into the mirror. But at the same time, you can't stay there. You take the steps that you need to take to apologize, to make amends, to repent. And then your eyes, your gaze, your heart, your mind have to go back to Christ and remember who he is. Remember what he has done, remember what he has for you, love. And now remember who you are in him.
Joe: So it's almost like you may divide this into two different areas. One is the emotional side. One is the analytical side, and I don't mean to pit emotions against analysis. But in the emotional side you have to understand that you are always a child, always loved by God. But on the analytical side, this goes back to what you said about the enemy. You have to be able to say, maybe there's some truth in that. From a rational point of view, you have to look at that.
Jamie: Yeah, and you see people trying to dismiss one of those or the other, right? You have some people that say, man, they just want to look at it rational and say, man, feelings don't have any bearing on this whatsoever. I'm really sorry to tell everybody, but God made us as multifaceted beings. And our emotions are part of that, right? And not only is it a part of it, rightly so. God could have made a world that was square and white, only, and mundane and plain and ordinary, but he didn't. He made a world with sugar. Praise God. He made a world with chocolate. He made a world where things make us laugh. He made a world where we fall in love. He made a world filled with the full texture of life. And feelings are a part of that, and it's appropriate to have those feelings about things.
Jamie: When something good and joyful happens, you should have joy. When something hard and difficult comes, someone dies or someone perishes or you've lost in some dear way, you should grieve. I hate to tell everybody, but emotions are really part of who we are. And you have to deal with that side of it. How do you deal with that? You have to take that to the cross. You have to bring this back to the scriptures. This is, I think, in part what Paul is getting at when he says we are to take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ, right? So there's something bad that's happened, but we bring this under submission to Christ and his word and his truth. And a good example of this, John chapter 11. The ladies, when Lazarus is dead and Jesus finally shows up, they're mad, they're hurt and they're broken. It's just such a raw moment, right?
Jamie: And they basically ask Jesus, where were you? I mean, it seemed to them that he was aloof to their need and to their wound and to their brokenness. But then of course, Christ demonstrates his own compassion, his own love for us. A good example for us is, look, and there are moments when our feelings may tell us one thing. Maybe God doesn't care. But this is where we take that thought captive, bring it back into obedience of Christ by bringing the truth into the situation. We take those stories like John 11 and we see that even though it may appear to us at times that God is aloof and we may feel that way, the truth is not that. The truth is he does care for us. He does weep for us. He does love us, and so we bring that truth in. So you have to deal with the emotional side.
Jamie: On the contrast, some people will be just emotional. I'm loved and I'm forgiven, as if they don't have to go back and repair the brokenness that they created. Look, you are loved, you are redeemed. But man, if you hurt people, you've got to make that right. And you have to change what you've been doing. And so I think you do have to deal with both of those types of things.
Joe: And I think that even from my point of view, that makes sense even in a constructive... So that would be more of a deconstructive or a negative situation, where you've hurt someone, you have to go fix it. Right? But even in a positive. You've talked on your story about how, and you said even this time how you weren't a good reader and all that kind of stuff. And now you're leading an academic institution.
Joe: You know what I mean? There's a bit of irony there in some way, but it's also in following what God has called you to do, you haven't been able to just say, I'm not a good reader, but he's going to make a way. You know what I mean? You've had to put it in your own as well.
Jamie: I've had to put in my own. And people have asked, how'd you get done with reading and doing all those things. It's the tortoise and the hare. Slow and steady is faster than you think it is. And so part of that is yes, I've just had to grind through it. But there is a sense in which, people have said to me all the way through my... Early on I was in college and now clearly God's called me to do some academic things.
Jamie: I have to do it. And I would try to make the excuse, I'm just not a fast reader, blah, blah, blah, man. Everybody from my professors to my friends, they all assured me with great confidence, you'll get faster as a reader. Here I am after that long, long, 20 year process and I have to tell them, they were wrong. I never got faster. I am as slow today as I was in middle school. It just didn't happen for me. For years I felt that paralyzed me. Even after conversion, I felt like that was a monkey on my back. Today, I feel free from that because I know that despite that, God has the ability. Clearly, he's done it, so clearly he's got the ability to do things despite my weaknesses. And isn't that the gospel?
Jamie: Isn't that what Christ... There's not a one of us, Old or New Testament and then after New Testament in our lives. There's not a one of us that he calls to himself that don't have deep things wrong with them. I think part of what paralyzes us is people, we feel like if people just knew that I had this problem or that problem, they would know that there's something wrong with me. Newsflash, there is something wrong with you.
Joe: We all knew that already.
Jamie: That's right. And we know it. And the Book of Romans tells us that God demonstrated his own love for us in this. While we were yet sinners, he died for us. Which is to say he already knew warts and all. He knew every blemish. He knew every flaw.
Joe: Every coming failure.
Jamie: Everything you would do, even after conversion that you would do wrong.
Jamie: And yet, this is the gospel. He loves you anyway. And he died for you anyway. And he redeemed you anyway, and he's going to use you anyway. And so, I don't know. I guess after years and years and years and years of struggling with this, I started to believe by God's grace. Maybe that's true. Maybe I don't have to be Johnny Reads A Lot. And I don't have to be the guy just lighting it up in those ways. But I do have to be faithful. And I do have to trust that he can do something with the brokenness in my life. And the Gospel calls us to believe that, the Gospel calls us to act on that. And in short, get over ourselves. We can be consumed with ourselves in a very egotistical way.
Jamie: We can also be very consumed with ourselves in a very disparaging way.
Joe: And that's sneaky, because I feel like we're always on guard for getting a big head about things, right? That's easy to spot. I think it's much harder to spot focusing too much on ourselves because of our weaknesses.
Jamie: Right. I can never do this. I can never do that because I'm this, I'm poor.
Joe: We have to focus on us.
Jamie: I'm not an academic. I'm this, I'm that. I've made horrible mistakes. It is not about me. It's not about you. It is about the grace of God in our lives.
Joe: That's very encouraging.