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How Do You Know What You Don’t Know?
A Christian Podcast Central Classic Podcast
Jefferson Drexler:
Hello, and welcome back to Real Stuff My Dad Says, the podcast. The podcast where we talk about real stuff that my dad says. My name is Jefferson Drexler. I’m here with my dad, Rod. How are you doing today, dad?
Rod Drexler:
I’m doing great.
Jefferson Drexler:
And dad, as I said, this is stuff that you’ve said for years and years. Some people, well in our family, would call them dadisms. Other people call them Rodisms because they are things that you have not necessarily went to great lengths to learn and study and find these great discoveries about human behavior, but really, they’re just things that you’ve noticed about people.
Rod Drexler:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jefferson Drexler:
They’re things that you’ve noticed, the way people work, and great pearls of wisdom. I just want to let you know that I really appreciate that. And today we’re going to talk at first, about an amazing phenomenon that happens with everybody probably under the age of six, and basically anybody older than nine, and that is the great mystery that is coins coming out of two, three, four year old’s ears.
Rod Drexler:
Yes.
Jefferson Drexler:
I’ve got four boys. Three of them are five and under, and there’s just nothing that brings more joy to them than me being able to pull things out of their ears, whether it be a dime, a quarter, a remote control. Just recently, one of the kids couldn’t find one of his toys, a big old truck, and said, “I can’t find it. Dad, can you pull that out of my ear?” because they think that I can magically pull anything out of their ear. Now, my nine-year-old, he can easily see that I’m cupping this coin or whatever in my hand and I just happen to race it behind their line of sight, and I can magically pull it out of the ear. The nine-year-old knows what’s going on, but the littles, they don’t know what they don’t know.
Rod Drexler:
Yeah.
Jefferson Drexler:
And that’s a phrase, dad, that you’ve said over and over and over again in my life, how do you know what you don’t know? And that doesn’t just apply to pulling quarters out of kids’ ears, but it has a much larger magnitude in just the way that we relate to one another. Dad, tell me about that. What does that really mean, how do you know what you don’t know?
Rod Drexler:
Well, here’s a funny one for you. I probably never told you this story, but my dad used to do a little thing like that when I was a boy. Different world back then, but he was a heavy smoker, okay? So he used to take a drag off his cigarette and hold it in his lungs, and then he’d take his cigarette and he’d put it in his ear, and then he’d blow out the smoke, and so you were supposed to think that the smoke went through his ear and came out of his mouth. A different world, but it was funny. So, I understand that and of course, I did the magic ball trick with you, is that paper bag and I would throw an empty hand up in the air, like a ball, and then I would catch it, and as it went into the bag, I’d snap my fingers and it’d make a sound. The bag sounded like it caught something. So very entertaining for a lot of children for a long time.
Rod Drexler:
But how do you know what you don’t know is the question that comes about, and I don’t think people actually think this question very often, because we’re all so confident in the things that we do know. So we don’t go out there and say, “Okay, what do I don’t know about a situation?” any situation. I used to talk with people and they would be so convinced there is no God, and I’d say, “Really? How’d you come up with that?” And they said, “Because I know it,” and I’m going, “Oh, okay.”
Rod Drexler:
I want you to know that there’s a certain amount of knowledge in the universe about everything that possibly could exist, even beyond the universe. But in the universe, I would sit there and say, “Okay, here’s what you have. How much of the knowledge of that do you think you would know?” And people would just shake their head and say, “I don’t know.” And I’d say, “Well, let’s say that a genius could get 1% and I’m going to give you five. You are a five-time genius.” Okay? And what I would come up with then is, “So being a five-time genius, there’s 95% that you don’t know, but you just declared, in the heavens, in the world, there is no such thing as God.” And I’m going, “How in the world can you possibly say that? You can’t know what you don’t know.”
Rod Drexler:
And those are questions that we need to ask ourselves from time to time. If I’m so dogmatic on a situation, is it possible that I don’t know something that’s going on here? So it’s a fun thing to do from time to time. Ask yourself, “What don’t I know?” and then try to gain some different perspective.
Jefferson Drexler:
Now, some people would hear that and they’d say, “Oh I’m constantly trying to improve myself. I read the Life of Pi. I read Eat, Pray, Love. I saw this movie, that movie, I’m reading this philosopher. I’m trying to expand my horizons on a weekly basis.” But you’re talking much more, not just about facts or maybe even perspective. There’s something much deeper, day-to-day, in somebody’s life, that you’re talking about in regards to trying to know what you don’t know.
Rod Drexler:
Yeah. That’s a thing that most people go through and they’ll just sit there and they say, “This is my position.” And they think that their position is absolutely positively without any chance of being wrong. It is right because I heard it so many times on the radio or so many times on TV or so many times at books. This is the final position on all things. And I’m going, “Really?” I says, “Do you have any questions on that?” And they said, “No, I’m pretty sure that this is everything that there is.” And I’m going, “Okay.”
Rod Drexler:
So again, there’s stuff that you don’t know. So how do you know what you don’t know and experience that? I’m not talking about deep philosophy, although that could be fun for some people. I’m talking about the day-to-day things about life that you come across and I’ll tell people, if you spend too much time on something, let’s say public radio or something like this, or talk radio, and you have their position all the time and that’s all that you have, you’re spending way too much time on it. And what happens is that you won’t be able to see a different perspective, and there is a different perspective.
Jefferson Drexler:
Now getting to that, there are times though, where you got to make a decision on something.
Rod Drexler:
Sure. Truth is truth.
Jefferson Drexler:
Sometimes you have to make a judgment on something. I mean, you could spin your wheels over and over and over till the end of the world trying to look for different perspectives on whatever small situation may be. I remember a scenario not too long ago, we were trying to figure out what are we going to do with my son’s schooling? Keep him in the school that he’s at, move him to a different school, do a homeschool, a lot of different alternatives. We’re trying to weigh out A, B, and C as far as, the alternatives are out there and how do we weigh these different alternatives out?
Jefferson Drexler:
And it seemed like every single day something new was coming up that, oh, I hadn’t thought about that aspect of it. I hadn’t thought about that potential. I hadn’t thought about that perspective. And we could have done that from here to kingdom come but there becomes a time where you have to make a judgment. How do you do that with certainty when possibly there might be that thought in your head going, “Well, there might be something I still don’t know about this”?
Rod Drexler:
Well, you do have to make decisions, but six months before that time, if I said to you, “What do you think about the school?” You would have had it listed in A, B, C, and D, believing those. You’re on the PTA. So you supported the school and so what happened with that, is that you had a firm perspective, this is the way that it should go. And then all of a sudden you started to get some other information and then you started to see about charter schools, something like this. And you’re saying, “Oh, wait a minute, there is a different way of learning, and maybe there’s a situation that might make this thing better than the way we currently have it.” And you made your adjustment.
Jefferson Drexler:
So as we are looking at maybe relationships, we’re looking at dealing with other people. People at work, maybe your spouse, your kids, people on the little league team, whatever it may be, and you look at the way that they do things. I think it’d be easy, and I’ve seen you do it, I’ve done it, everybody’s done it, we see somebody handling a situation. You’re a spectator in their little moment of life, and you go, “Holy cow, I can’t believe that they reacted that way. There’s no way I would’ve behaved like that guy did just now. I wouldn’t have yelled at the ref like that. I wouldn’t have treated my kid like that,” whatever it may be.
Jefferson Drexler:
And I remember many times as a boy, you looking at a scenario like that, pulling me aside and say, “Hey, Jefferson, I want you to look at this. Know this, there’s something there that we’re not aware of. There’s something that happened on the way to the ball game or happened on the way to the restaurant. There might have been something that happened years ago that affected this scenario right now, that we’re not aware of.” And how do we know what we don’t know in this? And it really suspends that judgment in that scenario.
Rod Drexler:
I remember one time being in a softball game and the referee or academy umpire of the softball game didn’t show up. We had probably 12 guys on a team and one of the teams, this in the old, old days, we just played in Levi’s and a t-shirt. We didn’t have any uniforms or anything like this, but this other team had full uniforms. They had it all, hats, they had everything. They looked good. And so this one guy started to just rip on the empire for not showing up. And I looked at him and I sit there and says, “You know, we don’t know what went on in a guy’s life. He could have been in a car accident. He could have had a 100 different things occur,” why somebody didn’t show up at a time that they were supposed to. But what happened with it is that this guy just unloaded on him, thinking that this guy is a terrible person for not doing that. And what happened is that turned out to be the pastor of that church that was complaining about it, and it was just one of those funny things.
Rod Drexler:
So it’s a situation that what happened, is that sometimes we just don’t know, and so until we find out, we should give a little bit of grace to those things and grace to those people, and then from there, we can move into trying to understand the situation because I’ll tell you, the times that I’ve made a lot of those judgment calls on people like that, it clearly came down to a thing that I did not have all the information.
Jefferson Drexler:
So I guess that’s what begs the next question is, how do you know when you’ve received enough information? If your kid has been wronged in your mind, if your kid has been wronged by a teacher, or if there’s something going on at the playground. If there’s something going on at work and you look at your coworkers and you just go, “This isn’t right.” Whatever maybe that’s happening. You can do your homework and you can figure out some of the facts, but at some point, you got to cut the line or you got to reel it in. Does anybody ever sit in a position where they realize I’ve gotten enough information now, I know what I didn’t know in the past, and I’m ready to move on this?
Rod Drexler:
I was an umpire and a referee. For all those years, I knew that I had to make the call in the instant that the situation was going on. We’re going to make the call, and we’re going to move on, and that’s all there is going to be about the situation. I don’t mind doing those things. The question that comes down is, what do I do with the information afterwards? Do I sit there and just allow it to just eat me up from the inside, or do I sit there and start to say, “Okay, now that I’m away from the spark and everything else that occurred, can I sit back and sit there and say, “Okay, is there something that I missed in this situation?” I may have not known about something that was going to happen, and what question do I need to ask in order to do this?
Rod Drexler:
The other day I went to buy some shoes and a young lady came up and says, “Can I help you with anything?” And I said, “I have no idea what question to ask. So if I don’t know what question to ask, you can’t help me.” And she just laughed and then she just tried to say, “Okay, let’s get to the bottom of it. What is the goal?” And then she worked through it with me. Very good sales rep and I did buy the pair of shoes.
Jefferson Drexler:
Again, as we look at, especially relating to one another, and we look at the wisdom in taking the time before making any judgments, there’s usually a bigger picture involved than what we’re seeing right now. I guess then this kind of bleeds into another podcast for another day, but a way that you’ve always brought it to me is to look at the other side of the coin.
Rod Drexler:
Right.
Jefferson Drexler:
You look at a coin, you and I, we can hold the coin right in between us, and you and I will look at the exact same quarter, but see two totally different images in front of us. You’re seeing Washington’s face, me seeing the state flower of Georgia.
Rod Drexler:
No, I think it’s an eagle on there, yeah.
Jefferson Drexler:
It depends on what series of coin you got. You’re not seeing what I’m seeing.
Rod Drexler:
That’s right.
Jefferson Drexler:
That’s my point, we have two totally different perspectives looking at the same exact scenario. So, when you get to that, how do I know what I don’t know, do you stop making judgments?
Rod Drexler:
No, you have to make the call at the time, and there’s nothing wrong with that, even if you make a mistake when making that call, you’ve had to move on because it had to be done in the midst of that situation. If we look at the situations of God, the most important thing, and I’ll be challenged on this from a bunch of different people, but I will tell you, the most important thing about God in everything that goes on, is relationships. It’s all about relationship. Our relationship with God, our relationships with our spouse, our relationship with our friends, our relationships with our children. Everything about God deals with relationship, and then what happens with that, is that we have to be able to find the right question, and sometimes we just don’t know what question to ask.
Rod Drexler:
That’s where I’m talking about praying. You can pray and you can ask God, “What can I do in this situation?” But again, if my heart is hardened, if I already believe that my point of view is the only point of view, then how can I have an open heart to God to allow Him to move in my life? But if I sit there and say, “Okay, I don’t know what to do in this situation, because that person’s all wrong.” No, if I said that I don’t know what to do in this situation because I believe that I don’t have enough information here. So Father, just open my heart to that and allow the Holy Spirit to cleanse my heart, to not be hardened, to be able to see the situation differently. And then what happens, is that then I might get the question come to me, maybe if I ask this, maybe if I’m softer even, then that might change the situation and I can rebuild the relationship that God wanted me to be in in the first place.
Jefferson Drexler:
And to quote scripture, in the book of Romans chapter two talks about how God looks at us and treats us patiently, kindly, with tolerance, a model that maybe as we’re looking for the answer to those questions and what do we know what we don’t know, that right there is the model that we should pursue before we start snapping people’s heads off.
Rod Drexler:
Well, when you have a certain amount of information and you’re confident that what you have is correct, and that’s a hard thing to do. When I grew up, I grew up with four brothers and we were all right, every one of us, and we would argue all the time because we would be slightly different position on a particular item. But what happened is that as an adult, Paul talks about it, as a child, I thought one way and as an adult, I learned to think a different way. I find a lot of childish adults that are still out there because they’re not considering what they don’t know as an important issue.
Jefferson Drexler:
That leads us to the end of our podcast. So if you find yourself as being one of those childish adults, grown-up older people wearing diapers who have coins pulled out of their ears and are completely mystified on how that even happened, it takes a hard look in the mirror to come to that realization that I got some growing up to do, but yet I think that we all, whether it’s at age 16 or 36, we all have a point where we have to do that.
Jefferson Drexler:
So dad, thank you so much for shedding that spotlight on that tough question of how do we know what we don’t know and helping get us to that point where we’re not the little kid getting the coin pulled out of our ear, but rather we understand better on how these things happen, simply because we’ve asked the right questions.
Jefferson Drexler:
Thank you again for listening. Thank you again for being part of the show by messaging in via our website at realstuffmydadsays.com or at our network, E-Squared Podcast Network that’s located at e2network.net and there you’re going to find all kinds of really, really cool podcasts just waiting for you to soak up other people’s pearls of wisdoms. There’s so much great teaching and just different perspectives. So look forward to hearing your messages there. And again, write in to us, we want to hear, do you like what we have to say, do you disagree with what we have to say? Do you have questions for my dad that maybe he and I haven’t even thought of yet, or maybe even do you have some dadisms of your own? We want to hear about them.
Jefferson Drexler:
Until next week as we’re putting together next week’s show, thanks again for listening. And as my kids always say, “Hey, I’m just trying to help.”
