SPEAKER_00 0:02

Welcome to another episode of Jubilee Life Coach's life blog. I recently came across a YouTube teaching video in Korean and I wanted to share the content with you. So let's listen. The one thing that you cannot outsource is the title. The one thing that you cannot outsource. It involves an interview by a Korean um media person uh with a professor. His name is Cho Byok. And the professor has worked inside Korean education for a long time. He taught engineering in the United States and in Korea, and he now co-directs HD Hengbok Yong Guso. Hengbuk Young Guso means happiness research center. He does that with his wife, Dr. Choi Song E. And both were trained at the Heart Math Institute in California and holds its resilience master trainer credentials. Now early in this interview, he stops the room with one sentence. By international standards, he says, What we are doing to Korean children counts as abuse. It is a hard sentence, but he does not soften it. So this post is not a transcript, it honors what he sees clearly and then asks what sits just above the highest point that he reaches. So his arithmetic is very simple. We outsource the child to daycare, then to school, then to the academy. And if the child leaves in the morning and comes home at night, when we do, the whole day has been outsourced. Then he names the ending. He says in fifty years he says the child will outsource the parent to a nursing home. Now, this is not a curse, it is an observation. Children learn what we teach. The research he leans on is a is real. The adverse childhood experiences study, ACE study conducted by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention with Kaiser Permanente has showed that early adversity leaves long marks on adult health and mental health. This was in 1998. Adults who reported more of these had markedly better mental and relational health, even when they had also carried adversity. This was the study from Bethel 2019. So adversity does not get the last word. And that's what the data says. So the Professor Joe says, public or private, any education that drains the life out of a child is dead education. And I concur. Deuteronomy 6 7. You shall teach them diligently to your children and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down and when you rise. Pretty much everything that we do on a daily basis. So notice what there is no curriculum here, no academy, no workbook. There are only the seams of an ordinary day, sitting, walking, lying down, getting up. You see, those seams are exactly what we outsource. And we did not outsource information. Information is being delivered efficiently. What we handed over was share time, and which is where formation actually happens. Now take a look at the chart that I have on my blog, the outsourcing ledger. What can be delegated, such as math instruction, grammar drills, piano fingering, sarca technique, and admissions strategy, that they can be delegated. What we cannot outsource is what? The sense of being safe, a parent's facial expressions, unhurriedness, calmness, and ten minutes of presence with the parents. Parents loving each other, respecting one another, and faith handed on in covenant. These cannot be outsourced, not even to the church. So the host asks what the most important thing a father can do for his child, and she guesses play. Professor Cho says that is roughly the fourth. Listening is third. The first thing that a father must do for the child is what? Loving the child's mother. And his reasoning is plain. Doing things directly for a child matters less than building the environment the child lives inside. When the home is a safe place, growth happens on its own. And this is not a new discovery, it is an old order of operations. So in the Bible, Ephesians 6 4, Paul addresses child rearing twice and both times he warns the parent, not the child. He says, Fathers do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. In Colossians 3 21, he says Fathers do not provoke your children lest they become discouraged. So what Paul feared was not rebellion, it was discouragement. The Greek Athemeo describes a spirit that has gone slack, a person whose heart has lost its wind, not the child who shouts, the child whose light quietly goes out. And this is precisely what Professor Joe is describing, a child instructed all day, corrected all day, sitting still with feelings switched off. The child does not rebel, the child dims and flickers away. When the Westminster larger catechism treats the fifth commandment, it does not only list the duties of children, it also lists the duties of those in authority. The reform tradition has always read this commandment as running both directions. So he asks two questions. Did you memorize the multiplication table in one pass? Do you remember your first date? Now information without emotion takes hundreds of repetitions to stick, but events carrying emotion are engraved in one. This holds for the good ones and the wounding ones alike. So being dismissed or held in contempt inside a relationship leaves a deep mark on a child. The reverse is also true. Being loved and respected builds a self that holds steady. An insult still stings, but it does not swallow the person. The professor names one more thing. Children trained to switch off feeling in order to study cannot identify their own emotions. Everything collapses into one word jajangna, which means irritated. Without access to emotion there is no access to need, and without need there is no self knowledge. Brandon Brown treats this as a vocabulary problem what we cannot name, we cannot work with Brown 2021. So his question is a good one. Where is the heart head or chest? Scripture gives a third answer. The biblical heart is neither thought nor feeling. It is the governing center of the whole person. Keep your heart with all vigilance for from it flows the spring of life Proverbs four twenty three. A careful distinction belongs here. What neuroscience describes is cre a creaturely limitation. We do not remember well without emotion. Our vision narrows under stress. That is not sin. That is how we were made. Jeremiah is speaking at a different level. The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately sick. Who can understand it? Jeremiah seventeen nine. So self awareness is a worthy discipline, but there is a point that looking inward cannot reach. The heart knows how to lie to itself, which is why we need a word that comes to us from outside ourselves. The most interesting moment in the interview the Professor Cho says that shortly before his death Maslow regretted not having revised the pyramid because there was one more stage above self-actualization. That stage is self-transcendence. Now because the word sounds religious to Korean ears, he remain he renames it to something different, relational fulfillment, he ne he calls it. Now it checks out, Maslow amended his model in 1969, placing self-transcendence beyond self-actualization. And this was the work by Kolko and Rivera in 2006. And Maslow died in 1970. Now verifying it turned up something larger. Maslow never drew the pyramid. The triangle was produced in 1960 by someone simplifying him for a business audience. Bridgeman, Cummings and Ballard, according to them, 2019. Maslow himself never claimed that lower needs must be fulfilled before higher ones can operate. So the problem is not only the top wrong, it is the whole ladder. Now remember Westminster Shoulder Catechism, question one, what is the chief end of man? Man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever. Now the shorter catechism does not build a ladder. It names this destination in its opening sentence. Maslow put self transcendence at the summit, a place one might eventually reach after long growth. The catechism puts it on the ground floor. A person was made from the very beginning for someone outside himself. The difference matters. If self transcendence is a summit, it becomes an achievement. Achievements become credentials and credentials send us back to ourselves. Now even the effort to get past the self turns into another story about the self. Now notice one more thing. Question one does not treat glorifying and enjoying as two different tasks. It is one act. Duty and delight are not split. What the professor sees in Kwange Shiryan, the relationship is true. No one becomes whole while sealed inside himself. But the direction he points is horizontal, you, us and so forth. But the reform theology says the horizontal comes out of the vertical. A person held by God is free toward his neighbor. The professor coins the term adult ship or odonship. The difference between an adult and a child, he says, is not age for the numbers of age. A child lives by receiving, and that is not a fault. That is what a child is. An adult is one who has learned to give. The problem is the grown person still guarding only his own portion. Today's parent, he says, has become a manager. Every stone is cleared from the child's path in advance, and inside the greenhouse the flower is magnificent. Unfortunately, outside it wilts immediately. Apostle Paul uses the same picture. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. It is more blessed to give than to receive. One more thing. Reformed theology adds one more thing here. Christian maturity is not self sufficiency. We never stop receiving from God. If anything, we receive more as we age. What changes is the direction. Ephesians four pictures maturity this way. We're to grow up in every way into Him who is the head into Christ. Ephesians four fifteen. Maturity is not standing alone, it is being properly joined. So growing up is not the end of dependence, it is dependence relocated. We stop making demands of people and learn to ask of God. Only then do we have anything to give to people. So at the center of resilience, he says, are three capacities self attunement, relational attunement, and attunement to the common good. Now aggression is a failure of relational attunement, he says. Escape is a failure of self attunement, and withdrawal is a failure toward the common good. And because the drive to connect never disappears, a person who cannot connect to people connects to something else games, alcohol, and nowadays, long conversations with an artificial intelligence. Now he says something useful about distance too. Most people think of distance only physically, but there is emotional distance and there is mental distance. Tune all three differently depending on the person. And you can stand near someone difficult without being shaken up by them. The practice he recommends is a set of questions. Why do this person's words move me? Why am I still carrying a remark from someone I do not even respect? Which emotion is doing the work here? Where does it come from? So through the lens of IFS and through reform qualifications or theology, we can say the following. The self awareness that he describes overlaps closely with part's work. It is not the whole person who is shaken, there is one part that reacts to that particular remark, a part still guarding a place where dismissal once landed. Attunement begins by asking what that part is protecting rather than trying to remove it. Reform theology presses on one step further. IFS holds that an already whole self sits at the center and that when parts step back, that self resumes leadership. Well, the parts language is genuinely useful, but the scripture does not describe our inner center as self sufficient, far from it. It is God who works in you, both in both to will and to work for his good pleasure. Philippians two thirteen. So we're tuned by God's grace arriving into us from outside of us. And one more, some things do not need reconsolidation. They need forgiveness. Wounds require care. Sin requires pardon. You collapse the two and you lose both. Almost to the end. Later in the interview he distinguishes two kinds of happiness. Feeling happy is happiness because of something. It comes with conditions. Remove the condition and the happiness goes with it. Being happy is happiness while the situation is still hard. It is happiness nevertheless. So then he re names the sorest place in Korean education, children living unhappily now in order to be happy later. They will be unhappy later too, unfortunately, because that is the way of living they were taught. What he observed over many years Habakkuk, the book of Habakkuk sang in a single sentence Though the fig tree should not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines, yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will take joy in the God of my salvation. Habakkuk three, seventeen and eighteen. So you see, Habakkuk erases the conditions one by one, fig, vine, olive, field, flock, herd, and so forth. Nothing is left standing. And from that empty fe uh empty place he says he will still rejoice. And this is the theological root of being happy, because the ground of joy sits in God rather than in circumstance. So joy does not collapse when circumstances do. The practice he recommends takes three minutes a day, one feeling from today, one good thing, one hard thing, and what was still fortunate about it. One of your own strengths, a hundred days of this, he says, changes a person. The practice appears to come from the hangbook ilgi developed by his wife, doctor Choi. Now his closing instruction matters most. Do not assign it. Do not assign it. Do it yourself first. Teach a child with words and the child argues. Show a child with your life and the child follows. He says PTSD besides PTG. PTSD meaning post traumatic syndrome, PTG meaning post traumatic growth. The same stress becomes disorder in one person and growth in another. The vessel gets larger. So some of you have grown heavy listening to this or reading this blog. Immigrant parents especially. You did what the era asked of you. You worked to pay for the academies and you drove late at night so your child would not fall behind. You were taught that clearing stones from a child's path was what love looked like. No one showed you another way, however. So Professor Joe extends a hand here as well. It is not too late, he says. When the parent changes, the child follows. Because children are born wanting connection with their parents, no matter what. So the gospel says one thing more. Even where a parent never managed to change, God does not change. For my father and my mother have forsaken me, but the Lord will take me in, the psalmist said in Psalm twenty seven verse ten. And this is our deepest ground. Our identity was not earned through good enough parenting. It was given in adoption. Romans 8 15 says, You did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the spirit of adoption as sons by whom we cry Abba Father. That word reaches the child whose home was never a safe place. It also reaches the adult condemning himself for not having been a better parent. Reclaiming one seam of today, dearly beloved, is enough. Ten minutes will do. Turn off your cell phone and have your presence with your child. Sit next to your child. Sit in front of that child. Spend some time. One day at a time. Well, thanks for listening. This was rather a long uh podcast, I realize. Um I do have the blog, the text on my homepage, jubileecoach.com, and on it also, I have five questions for you to think through. Thank you once again for joining us. Godspeed.