I think a blog should begin with an overview or a history of how the blog came to be and the philosophical bent of the author. Perhaps that is not really the point, but here it goes.
First of all, I have always had a conflicted relationship with change. I can remember from when I was very small, that I always had my own way of seeing things, but I was not very good at making other people see things my way, which created a deep frustration and and a certain kind of alienation between me and other people. I've never seen myself as a leader (because other people won't listen) or a follower (because other people's ideas aren't that good either). I keep trying to make myself understood, but not to much affect. I once had a very insightful person point that out to me: that I try harder than most to communicate.
Since I began working on my Ph.D. in the Higher Ed program at Azusa, I have acquired a paradigm of sorts to explain this phenomenon using my strengths. My top five strengths are strategic, restorative, futuristic, ideation, and intellection. I have realized that being strongly restorative has been a source of disruption in my life. Combined with my other strengths, it creates more angst than action, though. According to Myers Briggs, I am an INFJ, which means I am idealistic and relationship oriented. According to my upbringing, I am a conservative Christian woman. I love my upbringing and identify strongly with it, even though it clashes with the two personality types that I have shared. I do not want to cut ties with that background even though it is perhaps the slowest of almost any to change. Yet at heart, I am a revolutionary. It's been really hard to know what to do with that, so mostly I haven't done much.
My desire for change is very intellectual. I am not the sort to go out and start riots or even restructure a company. I have too much self-doubt for that. It is too easy to see the ways that I might be wrong, and that self-doubt paralyzes me. However, it is also too important to stay true to myself for me to just live in an environment that goes against all of my instincts, so I've moved around a lot in my life. In my twenties, I lived in almost 15 different houses. I attended four separate undergraduate institutions. I had ten different jobs. If I could not change my environment, then I would reinvent myself.
Then I came to Sias, and for the first time in my life (miracle of miracles) I fit in. That is, Sias International University is such a dynamic place that no one really fits in, and therefore I have space to be different, and I just happen to have family here as a social anchor. In the shifting norms and expectations that give everyone else headaches, I live peacefully free to define myself and perhaps even influence my environment.
For the first five years that I was here, I didn't do much to influence my environment. It was enough to have my class to teach, where I could experiment with breaking down the boxes of how composition is currently taught and redesigning the course in the way that I personally thought would work best for my students. However, a few years ago, a teacher sent out an anonymous email to everyone on faculty criticizing an event that had happened in the communal dining room. The email struck a nerve because the issue was a point of contention for many people (several of whom did not sympathize with the position that the email took). Later, discussing that email with others, I lamented the tendency towards such strife in the faculty, and another teacher commented that it was easy to stand on the outside and be neither part of the problem nor part of the solution.
His comment stuck with me and I began to think about what I could contribute to this community in terms of stability and order--how I could help. This experience and my attending reflection marked a shift in my thinking from leadership as influence (of which I felt I had none) to leadership as service (in which a person who has something to offer should offer it). I have been grappling with the implications of that shift ever since. What do I have to offer? Where should it be offered? To what extent is God asking me to get involved? These are my personal questions that will shape this blog.
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