Welcome to Chaos- Personal Understanding
By Kay DeVries
Here at Grace, personal understanding is huge. We take tests and get profiled to better understand ourselves. We have growth groups and school events to better understand each other. We have chapel and go to church to better understand God. We have professors and faculty who want to understand us.
All of that has credibility. I finally figured out why I’m a little bossy, why I make decisions quickly and why some people are put off by my tendency to be overly logical. All this “understanding training” has improved many of my relationships and the way I approach people.
But (there’s always a but) that’s also something that I had to choose to do. I can be categorized and scrutinized. I can have my personality poked and prodded throughout college and still not become any better than I was as a freshman. All that information that I’m having shoved down my throat is no good to me if I don’t chew it a little bit—digest it until I find out what those tests are trying to tell me. Somewhere in there, apart from all the riff-raff of cookie-cutter tests, is the wholesome piece of truth about who I am.
As we realize who we are and who other people are, we discover that it’s not always the world to blame for the problems we face. Sometimes it’s ourselves that we don’t understand correctly. And a lot of times, I think so many of the little problems we face day to day, month to month, could be fixed if we tried harder to understand the people we interact with.
With my best friend, I’ve gotten to the point that when we have our little fights or disagreements, I’ve stopped blaming her in my mind. Instead, I’ve begun to believe that the reason we’re “fighting” is actually my failure to understand her (and vice versa). It’s saved us from a lot of unnecessary quibbles and angst. As always, I never claim personal perfection—I’m still learning as much as anyone else.
But instead of taking these tests just to create an excuse of “that’s just the way I am,” we should be finding ways to rise above the clinical and find a way to improve our relationships and ourselves. We just might find a deeper level to our own identities.
