Doug Jones
I woke up this morning thinking about a chapter of a book I read over a year ago. The book is Blink by Malcom Gladwell. If you have not read it you should. There is a chapter in the book where Gladwell discusses a fascinating research project that employs what he calls “thin slicing”. It has been a while so I may miss the details by a little but essentially researchers would record the casual conversations of married couples and then dissect them into one second fragments or “thin slice” the conversations. Then they would score each of the multitude of thin slices based on the tone of voice, body language, etc.
Voice tones and actions that demonstrated a negative disposition or attitude toward the other person were given poor scores and those demonstrating positive attitude or disposition were given good scores. They would do this without regard to what the couple was discussing; they could be talking about the dog, apple pie, the color of the wallpaper. The topic was irrelevant and even if the couple was having a seemingly positive conversation the negative undertones of the attitudes and dispositions would come through in the thin slices. The research results were remarkable. Based on the cumulative score of all of the seconds they were able to predict whether a couple would still be married a few years later with better success than leading marriage counselors. Even if a couple seems perfectly matched and deep in the bliss of love, if their thin slicing indicated a poor score more often than not the marriage didn’t last because of this underlying disposition.
In essence a person’s subconscious disposition toward the other person was a better indicator of whether the marriage would be sustainable than were experts trained in the field. My synopsis doesn’t do justice, so you should read the book. If you like Blink you should also read the first five chapters of Nudge. I should note that Gladwell applies the term thin slicing more broadly than just what I have mentioned in the example above.
Back to my thought, for some reason I stepped out of bed thinking about whether there is a way to thin slice our faith walk, our relationship with God. And if so, what would that say about each of us individually as pursuers of Christ. Seventeen years ago the professor of my freshman speech class drummed a saying into my head, “Attitude Determines Altitude”. That applies very directly in the marriage example from Blink. It also applies to our Christian walk. While we don’t have the technology to thin slice our conversations with God and other believers I am reminded of the passage that says that the Word of God has the ability to discriminate between the very thoughts and intent of our hearts (Hebrews 4:12).
Of course we are never going to get back a score after reading the Bible telling us what our chances are of sustaining our relationship with God. But I have no doubt that if we spend enough time in the Word we will begin to see where our attitude and disposition toward God, other believers, even unbelievers needs to improve. We may even see why we are flying 3 feet off the ground when we were born to soar.
By coincidence, if there is such a thing, my reading today was in Philippians 2 where Paul starts talking about the attitude that we should have as believers. He basically says, “Are you encouraged by the fact that you belong to Christ? Are you receiving the comfort of His love, the fellowship of His Spirit? Is your heart full of tenderness and compassion? You should have agreeable attitudes, loving dispositions, unity in your purpose. Don’t do things for selfish motives or to be impressive to others. Be humble. Put others and their interests before yourself.”
Then in verses 6-8 Paul explains how Christ embodied this exact attitude in His life and death. A perfect example of what we should be in encouragement, comfort, fellowship, tender compassion, humility, etc. Paul goes on to give further advice on the attitude and disposition that we should have in verses 12-18. He mentions things like being reverent toward God, not complaining or arguing.
I believe God is speaking to me today, asking me to examine my attitude and disposition toward Him and toward others. So I am looking in the mirror today. Trying to decipher the thin slices of me that are left after the Word has discriminated between my thoughts and intents. Hopefully I can see enough to improve a little today and a little more tomorrow.
DJ
