I have a fascination with Myers-Briggs typology, as I’m sure many of you are aware. It’s not a fail-proof system hard-wired into our brains. I use it as the Dewey Decimal for people. (No author pens the last word in a novel just to have a magical number come floating out of the text. Rather, we create a system in which to organize and assemble the thousands… millions?… of books in every crack and corner of creation. The Myers-Briggs categories are a manmade invention assisting us as we try to classify and categorize the individualities of billions of people.)
So yes, Myers-Briggs = DDS for people. Mankind oversimplified. It is especially helpful for the more reserved cerebrals like me who struggle to relate to 98% of the human beings in their surrounding environment. If I can study up on a person, I can prayerfully find a way to interact with them in a way that is meaningful to them.
The problem is, it’s a venture with little ROI.
My category is INTJ. That’s “Introverted, Intuiting, Thinking, Judging.” My personality type is represented in 0.8% of the female population. Can I tell you how difficult that makes life in the social arena?
Don’t get me wrong – I’m blessed with a lot of friends, or people who show a general, occasional interest in the happenings in my life. I even have a couple “Feeling” best friends who have labored hard at bringing out the sliver of humanity in me that hides behind a less sympathetic exterior. (Actually, let me amend that. They help me remember to show compassion on the outside when in my core I am largely calloused, unconcerned, even antipathetic toward others. ) But no amount of bodies and faces and beating hearts (or, if I’m talking to a believing crowd, community) around me can soothe the loneliness that pervades existence as an INTJ.
It’s only this summer that I’ve begun to see the absence of like minds and like hearts as an untethered life. Lonely, but untethered.
You can be tied down to so many things and not even realize it. For example, I’ve never been one to be tied to stuff. My husband would be the first to testify to my disdain for material possessions. I go shopping only when I have a need and I don’t create fanciful or fun Christmas or birthday lists. A love for objects, the accumulation of objects, doesn’t even fit in with my interpretive system.
There is nothing sinful or wrong about enjoying and finding pleasure in possessions that God has gifted me with. The danger is in the insatiable hunger for more. More of anything. More recognition. More admiration. More shoes. More cylinders. More knowledge. More influence. More titles. More opportunities.
And for me, the most dangerous want of all is the want for more people like me. Women in particular, as that is where the bulk of my friendly social activity must revolve as a married woman. Women who will talk about abstract ideas, theories and possibilities. Women whose every thought and conversation doesn’t have to revolve around other people and relationships in their lives. Women who find true enjoyment in sharing a conversation with another woman on theology, philosophy, science and current events and drawing conclusions, making meaningful interpretations. Women who read more than self-help books with Christian labels, and then want to really dig into a text, analyze it, discuss it.
It’s this particular want for a world where more women filter life the way I do that puts me in a deep spiritual trench time and time again. I begin to avoid answering the phone, keeping conversations brief and task-oriented. The seed in my heart that clings to what I want more than it clings to Jesus begins to grow, and little creeping tendrils of bitterness suddenly penetrate every aspect of my life: marriage, motherhood, fellowship with my Christian brothers and sisters, evangelism, family relationships, friendships. Suddenly, I am my own world, the only world that matters. Everyone else is an accessory.
So what is so liberating about this loneliness? It’s the mechanism by which God drives me so deeply into the sickness in my own heart that I can’t help but confront it and deal with it. He gets me back to the place where I can remember and say with conviction, “No. I don’t need more of anything but Jesus.”
The moment I stop needing people to be what I need is the moment I find myself truly beginning to love them exactly as they are.
Life untethered. When you love something just as much as you should, just as it is, and stop manipulating it to fit comfortably into your little universe.
cluttered closet theology 