Dear family, friends, and Internet strangers,
I rode to the local pottery studio with a friend earlier this year, and as she parked in what is one of my least-favorite parking lots ever, she asked me if she should move over to be closer to the next car.
“I don’t know,” I replied. It’s one of my least-favorite parking lots because it’s small, awkwardly situated, and has no lines. The design relies on everyone using their judgment to park appropriately and leave enough, yet not too much, space between vehicles.
I am generally a rule-follower, and I realized at that moment that I like rules, at least partly, because rules can excuse me from the need to develop my judgment, use my judgment, and be held responsible for my judgment if I choose wrongly.
The rules are someone else’s problem, and I just need to follow them. Or, if I don’t like them (e.g., overly narrow parking spaces), I can simply complain about them.
And I realized that perspective is seriously wrong.
I am able to determine an appropriate amount of space between cars, to forgive car owners for bad judgment if they park too close or too far away, and to communicate with others as needed to rectify a situation (like if I can’t get back in my car because adjacent vehicles are too close!).
There’s an idea floating around that if systems are designed well, nobody has to use their judgment. In this case, someone could have designed lines into the parking lot, or better yet, Indianapolis could improve its public transportation so I wouldn’t even need to drive.
I see the appeal of this idea. Reading the news tells me that even people with power can lack good judgment, yet its absence where it’s needed is harmful. So why not reduce the need for anyone to exercise it? Just build good rules and systems.
There are multiple problems with this way of thinking, not the least of which is that if nobody uses their judgment, when someone is in a position to create new rules, that person will also have zero experience seeing or using sound judgment.
And you don’t have to be a member of the U.S. government for this to apply. Perhaps you’re a teacher, parent, manager, volunteer coordinator.
If I make a system at our house for when and how we wash the dishes, it affects my husband and any guests who eat from said dishes.
Anybody affected by our decisions is affected by our judgment, for good or bad.
You can’t fix poor judgment with rules; you need sound judgment to make the rules.
And when I wind up with the power to design or edit a system, my judgment needs to be ready.
The Death of Good Judgment?
A recent blog post by Dr. James Emery White (pastor of Mecklenburg Community Church in Charlotte, NC), which I received after I’d written most of this, describes this plainly:
“The problem with policies is what Philip Howard calls the death of common sense. A policy makes decisions and directs procedure independent of the situation. In many ways, this is considered to be the strength of a policy. The dilemma is that it removes judgment from the process.”
-Dr. James Emery White, “Are You Organized for Control or Growth?”, Church & Culture, 11 July 2024. Bold and italics in the quote are original to the blog post.
The book Dr. White alludes to was first published in 1995 and describes the problem at a much, much larger level than either my own life or the strangling effect of overdoing policies within a church. The Death of Common Sense by Philip K. Howard appears to document the damage done by replacing judgment with rules at the level of the nation.
It’s true that human systems are largely unable to withstand a continuous barrage of bad-faith actions. Creating rules and systems that reduce the ability of people to damage an institution makes sense.
Expecting individuals to have to come up with answers for recurring situations from scratch every time they arise does not make sense.
Yet we cannot anticipate every situation. We cannot create accurate flow charts to deal with every eventuality. So we must, all of us, train to deal with the unanticipated, case by case, as it happens. Rules have their place, but they cannot replace individual wise judgment, and they can strangle it if overdone.
Power, Stewardship, and Freedom
I’ve found myself returning over and over to the question of how to choose the best path, and how to even find what paths are open, in the absence of a nice flow chart.
This year, I’m feeling opportunity costs acutely. I see how my “yes” to an invitation or new project means “no” to others. I imagine it’s because I’m healthier, and my choices are not being made for me by migraines and illness as they were in the past. I feel like I can do everything, and it turns out I cannot.
I love that I have the freedom and the power to make these decisions (and I enjoy a lack of migraines). But, as we all have heard hundreds of times, “with great power comes great responsibility.” The power to triage means the responsibility to do it well. (This ties to my September 2023 letter on freedom.)
This also ties to my letter from February this year (“‘What is Home?’ and Other Musings”), in which I said, “I want to be someone who cares not just for the house we own, but for whatever is in my power and authority in the wider region I now call ‘home’.”
In that letter, I gave examples of local stewardship like picking up litter when I go on a walk, voting, and engaging fully when I’m called up for jury duty. But to do any of that well requires sound judgment.
Power, freedom, stewardship—all of this requires wisdom.
So how do I grow in wisdom and develop good judgment?
If you ask that question while flipping through the Holy Bible, answers come up really fast. The idea is everywhere in the Old and New Testaments. I found three major categories of answers, applied here to my comically inconsequential parking-lot problem.
If you’re somehow still reading my Substack letters and aren’t Christian, perhaps not a believer in God at all: Hi, human! Bear with me, as you might find something useful, beautiful, or interesting here regardless.
1. We get wisdom from God.
The clearest and most obvious place to learn wise judgment is God Himself, Who knows all and made all. He knows what is best to do literally all the time.
a) We start with the fear of the Lord, in the sense of enough humility to see God as God, as Lord.
“The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight.”
-Proverbs 9:10 (ESV)
If I order my understanding to recognize that God is God and nobody else is, for starters, and all that that implies, that leads at least to enough knowledge to know Whom to seek, and to a better ordering of priorities.
“Wisdom” gets defined as “applied knowledge”, but applied to what end? With what priorities do I apply knowledge to a situation?
It is God’s perfect and good perspective that I seek, Godly wisdom, as opposed to worldly wisdom, which does not begin with a fear of the Lord and does not—cannot—have correct priorities. As James wrote in his letter:
“But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, impartial and sincere.”
-James 3:17 (ESV)
b) James also wrote that we are not merely permitted, but directed, to ask the Lord God for wisdom:
“If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you. But when you ask, you must believe and not doubt, because the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind.”
-James 1:5-6 (ESV)
That’s amazing news, yet I sometimes forget this. In response to such a prayer, God may provide a clear idea of what to do. He may also reveal His wisdom in Scripture.
c) God’s wisdom is in His written Word.
The Apostle Paul wrote about the value of holy Scripture in his second epistle to Timothy, in the context of knowing what’s true when many people are working to deceive:
“All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.”
-2 Timothy 3:16-17 (ESV)
If you, like me, have heard these verses so many times they’ve nearly stopped registering at the level of meaning, here they are in the NLT:
“All Scripture is inspired by God and is useful to teach us what is true and to make us realize what is wrong in our lives. It corrects us when we are wrong and teaches us to do what is right. God uses it to prepare and equip his people to do every good work.”
The Bible is full of wisdom. Even non-Christians find wise insight in its 66 books, quoting Proverbs or the teachings of Jesus without necessarily meaning to.
But the Bible doesn’t specifically describe every subject, and God doesn’t always tell me to go left or right. Moreover, the belief that I should be handed every answer returns me to the idea that there is a neat flow chart of rules for everything, which would mean I do not need to develop actual judgment.
And the premise of this letter is that I do. How close do I park to the nearest car? Or which good thing do I do with a block of time? This is not clearly defined in advance for me.
I know a Godly answer to the parking-lot problem is loving, peaceful, reasonable, impartial—not favoring my or my friend’s comfort and convenience over that of a pottery classmate. But that is not a number of feet.
I am grateful that God has given us the capacity for wise judgment, not just for blindly following the paths we’ve been given. And we have two other clear tools for growing in sound judgment.
2. We learn from wise counsel.
“Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another.”
-Proverbs 27:17 (ESV)
The Bible is full of verses about wise counsel, the most direct of which are throughout Proverbs (see Prov. 1:5-7, 11:14, 12:15, 15:22, 19:20, 24:6).
I am happy to ask someone who might have knowledge, understanding, insight. Sometimes I do a quick internet search with my phone to see what other people think. This is why my friend asked if she should re-park. She wasn’t sure, and I’m a more-or-less reasonable person who was also in the car.
My goal now is to learn how to make those judgment calls. Not just physical, rational judgments, but much bigger decisions with bigger consequences, sometimes for many people.
We can learn how to do that with other people, sharpening one another, especially in some form of good community with people who know you and your life, people who can trust each other. And, ideally, people with diverse perspectives and experiences.
There’s a picture of this within the Church in the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Ephesians:
“Now these are the gifts Christ gave to the church: the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, and the pastors and teachers. Their responsibility is to equip God’s people to do his work and build up the church, the body of Christ. This will continue until we all come to such unity in our faith and knowledge of God’s Son that we will be mature in the Lord, measuring up to the full and complete standard of Christ.
“Then we will no longer be immature like children. We won’t be tossed and blown about by every wind of new teaching. We will not be influenced when people try to trick us with lies so clever they sound like the truth. Instead, we will speak the truth in love, growing in every way more and more like Christ, who is the head of his body, the church. He makes the whole body fit together perfectly. As each part does its own special work, it helps the other parts grow, so that the whole body is healthy and growing and full of love.”
-Ephesians 4:11-16 (NLT)
But sometimes a community, even a seemingly sound church, can get so caught up along some foggy road that they convince themselves what’s false is what’s true, and vice versa.
How do you even judge whether someone else’s judgment is correct? Don’t I need judgment to judge that?
Sir Andrew Likierman, professor and former dean of the London Business School, wrote an article for Harvard Business Review that covers the topic of worldly discernment in business (“The Elements of Good Judgment”, Harvard Business Review, Jan-Feb 2020). He says:
“I’ve found that leaders with good judgment tend to be good listeners and readers—able to hear what other people actually mean, and thus able to see patterns that others do not. They have a breadth of experiences and relationships that enable them to recognize parallels or analogies that others miss—and if they don’t know something, they’ll know someone who does and lean on that person’s judgment. They can recognize their own emotions and biases and take them out of the equation. They’re adept at expanding the array of choices under consideration. Finally, they remain grounded in the real world: In making a choice they also consider its implementation.”
This secular approach includes learning to judge another’s judgment. It involves skills like listening carefully, considering the sources of counsel, considering your own obvious biases, and considering options you haven’t been shown (King Solomon is famous for a particular example of this).
I believe even Godly wisdom includes practical ideas like these. But there’s at least one more tool that helps us learn to walk wisely:
3. We learn sound judgment through training.
“But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.”
-Hebrews 5:14 (ESV)
God gives us wisdom; training helps us receive it.
Throughout the Bible, we see God’s people act in order to receive their blessings, whether Adam working in the garden of Eden before the Fall, Israel building houses and planting vineyards that would succeed, Elisha’s direction to King Joash to fire arrows out the window, or Jesus telling people to remove the stone from the tomb of Lazarus, and then to remove Lazarus’s grave clothes, rather than Jesus including those actions in His miracle.
When learning whether people are trustworthy, or how to apply Biblical wisdom to complicated modern situations, or how, as Charles Spurgeon put it, to tell “the difference between right and almost right,” it seems practice is required.
So what should I have done, when my friend asked if she should move the car? I ought to have considered the interests of the driver to our left, and the drivers who had yet to park to our right, and the space a car door takes when it’s open. I may have quickly prayed for wisdom, in case some detail escaped my attention in the moment (like a giant puddle in the lot). And then I could have made a suggestion to park as close as possible while still being able to open the door easily.
If we misjudged and left too little or too much space, we would learn for next time—if we paid attention, if we watched how the action affected the outcome. Training requires attention.
Those are the ways to develop in wisdom and sound judgment that I found in a perusal of the Holy Bible. We have great power to develop in wise judgment, and we receive daily the grace of a God Who makes things work together for good even when we do get things wrong. I must not fear the metaphorical line-less parking lot of life.
May we all grow in wise judgment.
Questions for you:
How do you decide between seemingly good, but incompatible, opportunities?
Where do you let God’s wisdom into your choices, and where do you have difficulty doing so?
If you’re not yet a believer in Jesus Christ, imagine if you had access to the wisdom of the Almighty God. What might be different about your choices? If you’re even a little curious about whether that’s a real possibility for your life, I have great news for you. You can find the Gospel (literally “good news”) spelled out clearly on my friend Tina Marie Cox’s website, Let’s Be Real: Real Good News.
If you don’t know Christ yet and want to, or have some questions, you can reply to this email, email directly at rae (at) raebotsford.com, or reach out to a Christian you know.
If you’ve decided to follow Jesus but are unsure what the next step is, I think I can recommend Dr. James Emery White’s book, After “I Believe”. While I have only just begun reading it myself, I’ve been following his blog for years and I find him to be solid, compassionate, a good communicator, and rather thorough about biblical truth.
If you don’t know how to find a church, you might start with online services at Mecklenburg Community Church (physically in Charlotte, NC), where Dr. White serves as senior pastor. You can join online as you seek a good church where you reside. They have a full online campus with services on Sundays and Tuesdays.
If you are seeking a church where you live: Based on personal experience, I can suggest Indy Vineyard Church in Indianapolis, IN, or Lifepoint in Palm Bay, FL, if you’re local to one of those. And as mentioned above, Meck has a physical campus in Charlotte, NC. No local church is perfect; in my own experience, these three I’ve mentioned are good.
Stories I Enjoyed This Month
The Chosen (Season 4)
I’ve written a little about the show The Chosen in these letters before. It’s a lovingly crafted series that treats the Gospels as a story fit for prestige TV (as I understand the term), focusing on Jesus’s disciples and their experiences. Much is invented for the show, filling in natural narrative blanks, tying ideas together, and raising worthwhile questions for viewers’ consideration.
The show isn’t perfect, but it’s amazing. The newest season walked bravely, unflinchingly, into grief, something it started in earlier seasons but faces even more directly here. It presents questions like, why does God answer some prayers, but not others? Why does God raise some people from the dead, but not others?
After reading Silence by Shūsaku Endō last year, I was bothered and tried to write a little about theodicy, the justification of “why a perfectly good, almighty, and all-knowing God permits evil”, as the online Encyclopædia Britannica defines it.
Season 4 of The Chosen approaches such a problem better than I’ve seen anywhere else in fiction that I can think of.
Of course, you really need to start with season 1, episode 1, for the full impact of season 4. It took a few episodes for me to get into it, but by episode 3, I think, I loved it. It’s available to watch for free at TheChosen.tv, and I believe it’s also on Amazon Prime and Peacock.
Whose Body? by Dorothy L. Sayers
This month, I finished reading Whose Body?, a murder mystery novel by Dorothy L. Sayers, the first in a series she wrote featuring the character Lord Peter Wimsey. Sayers was one of the Inklings, friends with C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.
This novel feels less accessible than the well-known works of Lewis and Tolkien. She used a lot of contemporary slang and cultural references (it’s a murder mystery, after all) that made sense in 1920s England, and that are generally lost on me, an American living a hundred years later.
I have an old edition of the Pocket Oxford Dictionary of Current English that I started referring to while I was in the early chapters of the book, and it helped a lot. It’s got plenty of definitions of old British slang (despite being the “New and Enlarged American Edition”), and is a treasure chest of older meanings of words that have morphed in usage over the century.
I also found a webpage that explains many of the cultural references, filling in some of the color of the novel that I otherwise would have missed entirely. Thank you, Dan Drake, wherever you are, for your “Annotated Wimsey”.
After my initial confusion, and a bit of annoyance with the whimsy of Wimsey, I ended up enjoying the story and the characters, especially the character growth of Lord Peter.
The book touches on the problem of the Sherlock Holmes “game is afoot” perspective of investigating the murder of an innocent human. Peter wrestles with this problem throughout. The puzzle he finds fun suddenly takes a turn and becomes very serious.
And, if it’s a game—a foxhunt, for example—should he be sporting and give the villain a chance to get away? I never would think that way, but I didn’t grow up an English gentleman in the early 20th century.
The book is very much on the topic of choices and judgment, and what good judgment looks like. We see the poor decisions of Inspector Sugg, the infernal logic behind the decisions of the villain, the way Detective Parker developed some of his good judgment over time, and the stress that grows within Lord Peter as he bears the responsibility of his choice to act. I ended up quite enjoying it.
If I can prioritize doing so, I’d like to read more of Sayers’s Wimsey novels.
Writing Updates
I’ve worked a little tiny bit on my novel, but we also traveled to see Ed’s family out of state this month, and we’ve had various other projects to work on at home.
I wrote this letter using part of the letter I attempted to write in March and temporarily abandoned, as described in the letter I actually posted in March (“Writing, Pottery, and the War of Art”).
I began with the parking-lot anecdote in both tries, but my overall direction changed. I believe I managed to “take the tangled remains of that letter and weave them into something good.”
Well, I also cut out a lot of knots, and tied in other ideas. It’s a reminder that, as others have said before, no writing is wasted.
That’s it for this July! If any of this was valuable to you—interesting, useful, or beautiful—share it with someone:
To truth, love, and adventure,
Rae
These Letters are 100% organic human writing—no AI involved.
If you missed a Letter, or just want to re-read one, visit the archive.
For more info about me or my work, visit my website.
And if you like using Facebook for some reason, follow my writer page. I don’t update it very often, and I plan to put all the same updates (and more) in these Letters, but I appreciate your “like” if you want to give it.
Disclaimer: All the views I express within this publication and on social media are my own, and do not necessarily match the views of any person or institution associated with me.