Half-Full or Half-Empty?

         

          All things are wearisome;
              more than one can express;
          the eye is not satisfied with seeing,
              or the ear filled with hearing.
          What has been is what will be,
              and what has been done is what will be done;
              there is nothing new under the sun.  Ecclesiastes 1:8-9

I’m tired. I just got home from the Twin Cities where, this morning, I had a 3-hour psychological evaluation. (No, I’m quite sane and fairly well-adjusted.) I went there and had this evaluation, because... well, I’m not sure if I’d mentioned it before, but I’m applying for ordination next year. And the psych eval is a part of the application process.

I always like learning new things, even about myself. But in all honesty, I hadn’t been looking forward to this meeting, partly because of the drive and partly because I wasn’t expecting to learn anything new. (I’d taken this evaluation twice already. I figured I kind of knew what the assessments were going to say.) The bigger reason, though, that I wasn’t looking forward to it was that I hadn’t really felt good after those other interviews.

But today was different.

I’d assumed it was me before, or maybe the whole psych eval process. After all, they can get pretty deep. There’s a certain amount of vulnerability involved. But now, I suspect there’s something else at work.

At today’s meeting, the psychologist, I’ll call him Jack, asked all kinds of questions – about my ministry, my previous work as a teacher, my family of origin, my marriage and divorce, my health, my ministry strengths and growing edges (only he call those something else) and so forth. After that, we went over the results of the battery of assessments I had taken last month.

When we had finished, it was about noon. I was tired, but I felt pretty good. I remembered that hadn’t felt this way the other times. The last two times I’d taken this evaluation, the psychologist, who I’ll call Jill, had done what I’m confident was a fine job. But I’d left the building feeling as if she saw me as “less than”, in a way I couldn’t put my finger on. Now, having worked with Jack all morning, I could.

After my time with Jill, I’d felt like she saw me in a glass-half-empty kind of way. The written report I received weeks later had the same feel to it. Although I have no idea how the report on today’s meeting will look, I left the meeting feeling as if Jack saw me in a glass-half-full way.

The report from today's meeting, which will be sent to the Board of Ordained Ministry in preparation for interviews this winter, may only be a little bit different from the previous ones. There will be some changes. I’ve grown – I’m more “me” than I was a few years ago. But even if there was no change, I’d still look back on this day as preferable to the other “testing days”.

Having been on the receiving end of both a glass-half-empty outlook and a glass-half-full outlook, I can say that, in my opinion, it makes a world of difference.