David:          As another year is about to begin, Karen and I would like to suggest an alternative to writing out a list of New Year’s resolutions.

Karen:          In one way, what we’re going to share is more simple than writing out a list of resolutions, but we believe it could prove to be more life changing.

Intro:             Welcome to the Before We Go Podcast featuring Dr. David Mains and his wife, noted author Karen Mains. Here’s David and Karen Mains.

David:          Let’s begin, Karen, with a word most people don’t use all that often. In fact, if they use it all, I’ll let you define what it means. That word is deviant and we’re going to talk about being positive deviants.

Karen:          Well, we usually think of sexual deviants.

David:          That’s a bad thing.

Karen:          But the word itself means that you are maybe even radically different than the people around you.

David:          Well, it means you’ve chosen a different path.

Karen:          That’s not an ordinary path. It’s not just someone who digs in their heels and says, “Not going to do that, don’t like that.” That’s not what we’re talking about. A deviant is someone in our context who is positive. And that’s what we’re going to talk about today. What is a positive deviant?

David:          Okay, why don’t you define it and where you picked up on this term because it’s not a normal term people hear?

Karen:          No, it’s not. I was doing research into the kind of people that change the world. I have two books that I will refer to. One is the Power of Positive Deviants; how unlikely innovators solve the world’s toughest problems. And that sort of gives a clue to where we’re going with this topic. And then the other one is The Power Of Unreasonable People. And that subtitle is How Social Entrepreneurs Create Markets That Change The World. And it’s more geared to the business community, but it’s applicable to everyday folk like you and me.

David:          Unreasonable people have negative feel to it as well. It’s so picked your poison.

Karen:          Yeah, it can be or maybe we should add the word positive unreasonable people to that title. The way the first book is positive deviants. Because these are the people, we need who make the world better. These are the people who are not content to look at problems in our society and say, well, who can change that or in their families or in their workplace or in their church culture. They’re the ones who identify a difficulty. It bothers them and they seek to find a way to change it to make it better.

David:          Okay, now did you pick up on this from these books or was this something you had kind of struggled with in your mind for a long time?

Karen:          One of the positive deviants in my life has been you, David. You were asked to go on a world tour with Food for the Hungry and you had the broadcast at the time, and you said, “Well, I really can’t leave because of these broadcasting deadlines.” And they were going to be gone for weeks. You said, “The truth is my wife is the writer in the family. She’s the one you want to take on this journey.” And so, you sent me off. I think it was six or seven weeks that I was gone.

David:          It was a very long time since you were gone.

Karen:          With four kids.

David:          Yeah, I became the house husband.

Karen:          I had friends who volunteered to jump in and help you and they were there. But I think the day after I had gone, Jeremy or Yungas came down with chicken pox or something like that. So, it wasn’t an ordinary period of time.

David:          But while you were on this trip, I guess what you’re heading to us is to say that you ran into some of these positive deviants. They were not normal people.

Karen:          I was traveling with Lorraine and Larry Ward. He was the CEO at that time of Food for the Hungry, which is an international development and relief organization. So, we literally dragged through more refugee camps from Hong Kong where they had high rises where they were putting refugees at that time who were fleeing from China.

So, I began to meet people who were indeed positive deviants. And these were the development workers who were on the international staff of Food for the Hungry. And that went all the way from the Far East to the Southeast. We dropped down in countries all the way home, taking six or seven weeks to do that.

So, I was exposed in a way that I had never been exposed to before. People who gave their lives to making the world a better place. They weren’t interested in fame. They weren’t interested in money. They certainly weren’t interested in money because they had to raise their own salaries for this organization as many missionaries have to do. But they were very, very interesting in making the world a better place.

David:          And mostly Christian.

Karen:          This trip was all Christians. Now I’ve made other trips where you meet people who are socially minded but not necessarily Christian. Good people though all of them.

So that was a life-changing journey in every single way for me. And of course, then I came home and had to do the research. I had a friend who was a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who wrote for the Chicago Tribune. I didn’t know him. I just queried him about some questions I had about writing this. And he gave me all kinds of mentoring time.  I mean it was just a lovely, lovely gift. And then I had to work through State Department reports, and I mean it was a plunge not even in just the trip around the world. But it was a plunge in the research to write a really good book. And the book was called The Fragile Curtain, which won a couple of national prizes because of the topic we were dealing with. And it was the work of those good people in the world trying to expose the readership to the fact that there were these problem spots, hot spots, but there were people who gave their lives to making it different.

David:          Now people listening to us will say, “I don’t have any opportunity to go around the world and meet some of these people.” So, have you met any of these? I’ll use the term again, positive deviants, just in the normal run of life.

Karen:          Well, you and I have worked with pastors, mostly you have worked with pastors. A lot of those pastors are positive deviants because they’ll say there’s no church that exists in this neighborhood or in this little town or the churches we have noted in the past. The message is the same but the custom and culture in the way that people have done church is not reaching those who need it the most.

So, I find that many of those pastors are kind of positive renegades themselves, you know, unreasonable people who say we can change church, we can make it better, we can plant it in a place where it will reach people.

David:          Because we’re going to come back and try to get people to identify and then become a positive deviant. For the new year, I was thinking of someone who fits that category. He’s an insurance salesman.

Karen:          Ok.

David:          And I like him in terms of the way he talks about his faith so freely all the time. In fact, I’ve watched him over a period of years. By golly, he’s just up front about what he believes, and some people can be repugnant.

Karen:          But he’s a charming personality.

David:          Oh, just incredibly so and sincere in what he says and he’s constantly talking about Jesus.

Karen:          But it’s not in offensive way. It’s an attractive way. Now I know this man because I went to grade school with him, and I went to junior high with him and I went to high school with him. And actually, he did attend a church, I think, that we planted in the city for a little while. So, he’s a remarkable man and every way has become a remarkable man. He was very popular in high school.

David:          He’s a high school and college athlete.

Karen:          But as far as him not thinking, well, this may turn off my insurance customers if I speak of my faith that he uses as an opportunity, doesn’t he? To speak of faith, meeting all those people. Wow, that’s great.

David:          And I am using him just as someone who’s trying to say, “Ok, who are these people in the normal world in which I live? And how do I become more that way?” And the challenge in my mind is that as we come to the end of this year and look toward the new year, let us learn to be positive deviants because I think that’s what Christians should be.

Karen:          Let me give you one little story that came out of one of the books I was reading that introduced me to this whole topic and it’s set in South America; and the writers were visiting and studying malnutrition among children.

So, they were in this little village in like in a lot of small villages. A common soup pot was put together and people threw in vegetables from their garden, and they prepare them, of course, and throw it in the pot and then they watch the pot, big pots, you know, you think of those great big black kettles, maybe like that. And someone would take up the big stirrer. We actually have one of those great big wooden spoons that I brought home from Africa. And they stir the pot with it.

Well, even with that, all the children in that village, these two students of culture were examining the children and there’s certain measurements you go through. You don’t even have to just look at a child.

David:          People have seen the ads on television. They’re asking for support. They’re good works.

Karen:          But you can tell just by measuring your child’s upper arm if they’re developed according to their age standard and their size. The children were malnourished in this small village, but there was one little family. The children were thriving. So how do you explain that?

Now, the interesting thing was that these people were studying this culture were outside of the culture. Everyone else who was in the culture just sort of assumed that that’s the way it was. The majority of children were malnourished, but this one mother’s children, they were thriving, they were healthy.

So, the people who were studying it began to observe. And sometimes you do need outsiders to look and tell you what they see. And they realized that when the soup was served, when mothers would dish out the soup with a ladle or gourd, probably, and pour it into some little container for the child, probably another empty gourd. They would just scoop out of the top. Maybe the gourds didn’t reach all the way down into the bottom. But the mother, whose children were thriving, used a utensil that reached all the way down to the bottom of the common pot and scraped off the bottom of it. The pieces of vegetables and sometimes shrimp that had come from the river, pieces of fish that had sunk to the bottom of the pot.

And so, her children were thriving because they were receiving nourishment because of this mother’s positive deviancy. And it was taken for granted by the culture. No one in the culture, you know, how we are, we get used to things. We say, “Well, that’s the way it is.” But they could see what she was doing because they were studying the culture.

And so that became the premise for their book on positive deviancy, that we need to watch for the people in cultures and for them foreign cultures who have come up with solutions that haven’t become popular but could make a difference in the entire culture.

And then for us reading that book. And then there’s another book that is, as I said, the power of unreasonable people, not going to settle for the status quo when the status quo is not working. They’re not going to get used to it and say, “I’m lifting my hands as I say this and shrugging my shoulders. Well, that’s just the way things are.” So, they make a difference. They determine to make a difference.

David:          So, I’m saying instead of just looking at yourself and saying, these are my resolutions for the new year, just think in terms of “How do I, in the coming year, be more of a positive deviant?” A person who goes on a different path, but a better path. And I think that’s very Christian in terms of what we’re asking people to do.

Karen:          Yeah, I kind of think Christians all should be positive deviants. We just don’t think of it that way.

David:          Determine that the power of being a positive deviant will mark your life in the year 2022. That’s my sentence. Okay.

Karen:          That’s a great sentence. It’s a contemplative exercise. Now I’m using that word because of my background in the liturgical churches. They emphasize the contemplative practice and there’s a part of me that loves the contemplative life. And that’s one where you set aside time to pray, to listen, to be still before God and to say to him, “How is it?” And I think this is the question I would suggest to our listeners. “How is it that you want me to be a positive deviant in some part of my culture in this new year?” That’s what you’re asking people to do, isn’t it, David?

David:          Yeah, I’m asking us as well. I’m going to ask you in just a second.

Karen:          Okay.

David:          In terms of my life, I have learned in these last couple years to become much more proficient in my prayer life.

Karen:          We don’t know what those intercessions are doing in the world. Often, we can’t know, but that’s what you’re dedicated to.

David:          I’m to the place where I’m surprised how God is answering prayers.

Karen:          Oh, good.

David:          And it’s becoming more and more a part of who I am. But now I want to be able to, in a natural, beautiful, friendly way, say the church has to come along here. If the church doesn’t become a praying church in this land, the culture is lost. And when I talk about it, it makes people uncomfortable because most people are caught up in a very busy lifestyle and they don’t have time to pray, and most churches don’t have a prayer base.

Karen:          We used to have regular Wednesday night prayer meetings, you know.

David:          And any certain core people would come. But that day has passed. I know that people will feel a sense of conviction, but I want to be able to talk in a winning…

Karen:          …positive way.

David:          Positive way. I’ll be a positive deviant, if you please. That’s my direction for this coming year. I don’t know if you’re at the place where you can answer that in terms of your own life, but probably so because you’re usually ahead of me.

Karen:          I think that the aging process has sort of stalled us out a little bit. The isolation of COVID. I mean, I just can’t believe we’re not having gangs of people and… like what you usually do, practice hospitality. But I am feeling that deep inner nudge. It’s not a new nudge to my great regret. I mean, this is a form of confession. I’ve had this nudge for years and that has been to write out into culture, not to the religious culture…

David:          …but to the…

Karen:          …non-religious culture.

David:          Non-religious culture. So, the Lord’s been pushing you and nudging you. Now he’s kicking you in the behind.

Karen:          Yeah, I’m getting a real prod. So, it’s an extraordinary amount of work because that culture that I don’t know real well needs to be researched. I think I have to cut subscriptions to maybe 20 magazines, periodicals that are non-religious. And people get that idea. Anyone who enters a new field has to research in that field. So that’s the process I’m in. But I’m also using it as a stalling methodology because I just somehow…

David:          It’s the confession part.

Karen:          That’s the confession part. I’ve done the writing. I mean, I have all kinds of things that have never been published and I just been going through it and thinking, “Well, this is really good writing. Great expression, creative expression.” I just didn’t need to start sending them out.

So that’s where I’m having to function as a positive deviant. Being someone who begins to write out into the secular culture, not a propagandized tone, but coming from the reality of what my life is and the lessons I have learned in the spiritual journey of some, what, seven decades now.

David:          Okay, I’m going to go back to that sentence again. And then I would also like to go to scripture and say, “Do you know anyone who was a positive deviant as a part of scripture?”

Karen:          Okay, let’s see if we can figure that one out.

David:          Okay. Determine that the power of being a positive deviant will mark your life in the year 2022. Let’s go to scripture.

Karen:          Well, as we said before, we think Christians probably all should be positive deviants. But our model for this, I’m just convinced to the greatest, deepest part of my soul is Jesus Christ. I think he was a positive deviant. I mean, he not only changed the culture of the Jews. They left their strict Jewish faith and became Christ ones or people of the Christ way. But his life, that brief time here on earth and then the coming of the Holy Spirit on those believers, changed culture all over the world and is still changing culture. I mean, it’s just extra-ordinary.

When the church is alive, when the church is filled with Christians who are positive deviants, and how they’re following the example of Christ, we also change culture. We become salt and light in our society. And one of the problems with America now, apart from everything else, we all can name and complain about in the democracy that we hear…

David:          …is regarding…

Karen:          Yeah, that is getting loosened here and scaring a lot of people is the church is not, and Christians are not being the positive deviants in the world filled with the presence of Jesus Christ.

David:          What’s that other book now the term in the other book is…

Karen:          The Power Of Unreasonable People.

David:          Okay, and I think Jesus kind of…

Karen:          …he was really unreasonable. But in a positive…

David:          He was totally reasonable and yet totally unreasonable as humans evaluate him. You know, like crazy guy is totally different. It’s wonderful. That’s the truth of the universe he’s talking about.

Karen:          I wrote a list out and I just remembered it now to how different he was from the culture around him. So maybe another time we can talk about this, and I’ll get that list out and prove from scripture that Jesus was the positive deviant.

David:          Even using that word deviant, I have to say he deviated from the normal path that people walked. Nobody else could walk it for him.

Karen:          No, no.

David:          He walked it all alone. But then he has a huge number of followers, and I hope that you know, you and I are a part of the train that is following him, that the massive number of people whose lives have been changed.

Karen:          So, the assignment is what?

David:          Well, we’re talking we have a little bit of time before the start of the new year, and I don’t know if people can resolve all this quickly in terms of their lives. But it’s a beginning process. A new year is coming with all of its opportunities and how do I become a person who demonstrates being a positive deviant. And what’s that other phrase again, an unreasonable person?

Karen:          The power of unreasonable people?

David:          Yes, experience the positive aspects of being an unreasonable person. I like the positive deviant. I think that’s I’m getting used to that.

Karen:          Okay.

David:          So, I like that a lot and as people wrestle with it, I would hope that they would say, hey, I’m getting comfortable with that term as well. It’s the very core of who I want to be.

Outro:          You’ve been listening to the Before We Go podcast. And if you would like to write to us, please send us an email at the following address, hosts@beforewego.show. That’s all-lower-case letters, hosts@beforewego.show.

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