Sandwich Making: INFJ Style

Are you familiar with the Myers Brigg Personality test? If you're not, take the quiz here http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/jtypes2.asp first or the rest of this blog will make little sense.

I first discovered MB at the beginning of my sophomore year in college as I struggled to answer the infamous "who am I" question. A lot of my friends had a love-hate relationship with Myers Briggs because they received different results every time they took the test. Not so for me. I always have been, and very likely always will be an Introverted iNtuitive Feeling Judging person.

So what exactly is an INFJ? Great question. My dominant function is introverted intuition, meaning I spend a large part of my day inside my head. Since I orient myself internally, I am often oblivious to the external world.  I tend to make decisions emotionally, and weigh how my actions will affect others before moving forward. In the last part of my personality, my judging side, the universe decided to throw me a curve-ball. Introversion, intuition, and feeling tend to be very time-consuming states of being. Yet because I'm a J I loathe being late for anything. I'm still trying to figure out if being a time-conscious creative individual is a blessing or a curse.

The above description may have made little sense to you if you are a sensing person so I'll insert an example: sandwich making, INFJ style. With sandwiches I like variety, but I like to draw that variety from three or four options. There's also an emotional component to sandwich-making. Ham-and cheese on wheat means I am at peace with my internal world. Peanut butter and jelly on white means I'm stressed out and need someone to listen to me vent. Putting together a sandwich can tire me because I must remember where in the Kitchen we store the different parts of a sandwich as well as where to return them when I'm done.

Once I've composed said sandwich I need to take it and leave the kitchen as fast as possible in order to re-charge. I often leave behind crumbs, and/or jelly smeared knives. I'm not being lazy. I do not do this to test the patience of the next person who wants to make a sandwich. For me, as long as the bread and peanut butter are back in the cubbard I've acted in kindness towards my neater room mates. Having lived with neat room mates I know that crumbs are their version of nails on a chalkboard. Please be patient with me. I'm learning.

INFJ's often get confused with extroverts because we love people. And we do love people. There's nothing like a meaningful one-on-one conversation to give me warm and fuzzy feelings.We tend to be great listeners so we're never lacking for people to talk to.  But anything more than one or two people forces me to expend more energy than I receive. Group settings exhaust me because I bring to them the intensity that I bring to one-on one conversations. But since we love people so much we tend to deny our introverted tendencies in group settings, drain ourselves of all energy, then have to spend a week in our pajamas oscillating between sleeping and reading Victorian literature.

For everyone reading this blog because they're looking for better ways to communicate with an INFJ I'd say resist the urge to patronize when reminding us of a detail we've overlooked for the hundredth time. We also like to be affirmed in our actions because can see ourselves as weird because we've spent too much time analyzing our actions and not enough time externalizing them. It's also helpful to ask "What are you trying to say?" We won't be offended. We're often just as clueless as you are :)

Come Writers and Critics who Prophecy with Your Pens

One of my mentors warned me of the perils of following my passions with reckless abandon because passion is, by nature, seductively bi-polar. Perfecting that invention bound to revolutionize the digital world will make the inventor's day go by faster, as he spends his nights burning the midnight oil. My mentor offered this wisdom not to discourage me from recognizing and working towards my passions, but to recognize how my passions work to distract me from my larger life goals.

Case in point.

Three of my passions in life are post-World War II American History, women's labor history, and domestic fiction. I can and will talk anyone's ear off about Johnson's War on Poverty, Le Leche League feminists, and Bronte fiction. In college I followed these passions to degrees in American History, English Literature, and Women's Studies. While my passions relate to each other, I was glad to study them separably to avoid sensory overload, i.e burnout. 

This equal, but separated system worked well for me until 3 days ago when I started reading The Help by Kathryn Stockett. The novel is set in Jackson, Mississippi in my favorite year of all times: 1963. In 1963 I was negative 26, so I learned to experience  SCLC sit-ins, the March on Washington, Bob Dylan's rise to fame, and Kennedy's assassination either vicariously or through history books. Told through the eyes of three narrators: Skeeter, a 23 year old 5'11 recent English literature graduate forced to move home to Mississippi after failing to secure either a husband or a job during her 4 years at Ole Miss, Aibileen, a fifty something black maid who raises white babies after her only son's suspicious death, and Hilly, a thirty-five year old mother of seven who don't take no sass from her employees because she takes so much from her husband, these women risk everything to give the help a voice. 

Needless to say by page 12 I was hooked. I read the entire 500 plus page novel in 3 days. Three days where I only changed out of my pajamas to go to church or for a run. Three days I should have spent packing, or hanging out with friends one more time before I move 5 hours away from them. 

See the problem with passions is that quickly become all consuming and turn into obsessions. I was so consumed with oh-my-gosh-the-only-thing-that-separates-Skeeter-from-me-is-40 years-and frizzy hair that I gladly overlooked Stockett's butchery of southern dialect and glorification of the Civil Rights movement. 

Needless to say, by 8:18am this morning when I finished the novel I felt like that kid whose mom let them eat a Reese's peanut butter and cheesecake sundae so they would think twice before eating them together again. But like most kids, the thinking tends to last only as long as my stomachache. The Help did not rid me of my passions, but did help me think of my passions in new and interesting ways, albeit, with some reckless abandon.

Fantastc, Terrific, Great

I know that it's been a while since my last blog post. I've been quite busy! Last week I volunteered as a head counselor for the People of God Summer Camp. Let me share with you some of my experiences.

I arrived at camp two Saturdays ago on what felt like the hottest day of the year. While Pittsburgh is no Phoenix, Pittsburgh in July is quite hot. First on my to-do list was to decorate my cabin, the Firefly cabin. We female head counselors tend to go a bit overboard with our decorations, and this year was no exception. As fireflies I wanted our cabin to be very bright, so I hung enough Christmas lights to make any other lighting superfluous. Looking back it probably wasn't a good idea to plug 3 power strips into 2 outlets, but miraculously nothing melted or exploded during our week.

On Sunday afternoon my campers arrived and the madness began. While 8 campers, ranging in age from 9-12 doesn't seem like too much for 3 experienced counselors to handle, it at times was. Although my official title was "head counselor" my job description included mother, traffic director, swim coach, cheerleader, playwright, pastoral leader, performer, singer, master of disguise, teacher, mover, waitress, and shower assistant. Thankfully I had really well-behaved girls and my assistant and junior counselor excelled at the art of convincing exhausted campers that they really wanted to go to bed. 

My favorite part of camp was the Friday morning combined prayer time. My favorite head counselor calls Friday's "marathon day" because on top of our regular duties we counselors must: forfeit our afternoon break, invent a really nifty hiding place for "Capture the Counselor," and must stay awake until the wee hours of the morning decided which cabin won which award for the parent's program. But the Friday morning prayer time makes the rest of the day more than worth it.

As a teacher you don't always get the opportunity to witness your students "a-ha!" moments. That moment where the seeds you've sown take root and the child starts to take ownership of the plant. All week we'd been teaching the kids about charismatic worship and the gifts of the holy spirit. We talked about using our bodies to honor God by lifting our arms and clapping our hands. And all week my girls really weren't feeling it. It didn't matter how loud I sang or how high I raised my hands, my girls clung tightly to their songbooks and kept asking me what time it would end. Needless to say my expectations weren't too high at the beginning of the meeting.

One of the gifts of the Holy Spirit that we taught the girls about was prophecy, or sharing with the group a word or Scripture verse that God puts on their heart. To be honest, I'd always been pretty freaked out by the gift of prophecy because it requires...gulp... public speaking. But that Friday morning I felt God tugging on my heart to share with the group a word of encouragement. So I took a deep breath and made my way to the microphone. I don't remember very clearly what I said, but I could feel a change in my girls as I walked back to my seat. No longer did I have to work to convince the girls to participate in worship. They started singing the songs. Some of them even raised their hands. At the end of the meeting I lead a train around the Pavilion that every one of my girls participated in, even the "cool" ones!

The funny thing about "a-ha!" moments is that we usually recognize it in others before we recognize it in ourselves. That prayer meeting taught me two things: 1. It reminded me of the power of the Holy Spirit and the personal ways it speaks to everyone. 2. It reminded me that the girl's unwillingness to participate in worship annoyed me because they mirrored my own reluctance to fully engage. I now understand why we counselors abide by the motto, it's a privilege to serve at camp. God uses our obedience to his call of service as an opportunity to draw us closer into his presence, a feet that is truly FANTASTIC, TERRIFIC, GREAT ALL DAY LONG!