Travis Garner,The Village Church
Think about your family or the family where you grew up for a minute. Jen Hatmaker is one of our favorite bloggers and authors in our house, and she wrote recently that there are two types of families: there are sweet families, and there are spicy families.
Sweet families are amazing. They have great manners. They love each other well. They share. They’re polite. They have a daily family devotional time. You might overhear the kids in a sweet family saying things to each other like, “My dear brother, would you like this last piece of pizza? I couldn’t bear the thought of eating it myself if it would mean you might still be hungry.” Or “Sister, thank you so much for volunteering to clean my room in addition to your own. I would be glad to scrub all the toilets so that our wonderful parents don’t have to do so, as I know they toil so hard every day so that we might have this wonderful roof over our heads.”
In case you’re wondering, the Garners are not a sweet family. We are 100% spicy. If you’re around us for any length of time, you will hear laughing, often followed by screaming, typically accompanied by whining, quickly followed by laughing. We feel all the feels in our house. You will hear potty humor. You will hear potty sounds and the imitation of potty sounds. You will see random dance parties in the kitchen. You will have to fight to get a word in because everybody thinks what they have to say in that moment is the most important thing ever. It will be fun, but it will be crazy because we really only know life at full throttle. One of the biggest things you’ll see is that we love to win. We live life all out and we don’t really settle for anything halfway.
Here’s a perfect example from this past weekend. We were at our nephew’s birthday party, the kids were all climbing on a rock wall, and the people running the party asked if any parents wanted to climb. We are obviously not going to turn down a challenge. Amanda and I immediately put on harnesses and began talking a little trash. Here are three very telling images about how our family operates in competition with one another.
As you can see, I was waiting for an “On your mark, get set, go” to start this in a fair way. Amanda was obviously not waiting for that moment.
Once I realized what had happened, I jumped on to the wall and furiously began climbing to try to catch up. I was gaining ground quickly, until about 2/3 of the way up the wall I looked to my left to realize that…
Our five year old was beating both of us! At this point I was so distracted by that reality that Amanda might have possibly beaten me to the top, but it’s all a blur and I don’t really remember and I’m sure I’d win a rematch.
Maybe this is just me trying to feel better about myself and my family, but I think this desire to win, to be successful, to outdo other people is something that many if not most of us share in life. Alfred Adler, a renowned psychotherapist and personality theorist in the early 20th century, called this desire “striving for superiority,” and he said it is the primary force behind people’s behavior, that all children feel as they develop feel a sense of inferiority, and that this striving for superiority is their way to overcome that.
Martin Luther King, Jr. once called this the “Drum Major Instinct,” the instinct to be important, to surpass other people, to be recognized, to lead the parade.
We see this play out in a number of ways, many of them unhealthy, in other people and in our own lives. For instance, some people feel physically inferior, and so they resort to violence in order to prove or assert their physical superiority.
Some of us feel intellectually inferior, and so our words are full of sarcasm and snark and judgment as we try to sound intellectually superior.
Some us have feelings of low self worth, and so we become arrogant and devalue other people.
Some of us live above our means because we want to seem financially superior.
Some of us get involved in every possibly activity and fill our schedules to the brim because we want people to know that we’re important.
We do this with politics. We do this when we pit school systems against each other. And I’ve seen this happen over and over again with churches. We want to be first. We want to be best.
Interestingly, it’s striving for superiority, or the drum major instinct that humans have in common that we see play out repeatedly in several interactions with Jesus and his followers in Mark 9. Read more about what Travis Garner wrote on his blog.
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