Karen: A letter sits on the pile of papers on my desk. It’s rested under the notes to myself in the project pages of all my little projects if I have finished articles for a couple of months. And it’s from Who’s Who in America.

David: Who’s Who in America?

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

David: I’m kind of curious as to what your thoughts are about Who’s Who in America. I assume it’s an invitation to be listed in their yearly book.

Karen: Yeah, and others in the past, when these letters have come through, have said we’ll include your name and then if you’ll pay a certain fee. And this one makes a point of saying we don’t ask for a fee, but it’s very problematic to me and that’s why it sat on my desk for a few months.

David: You didn’t say anything about it to me.

Karen: Someone in that crowd at Who’s Who publishing thinks that I should be included and it raises all kinds of issues in me. It’s just interesting what’s going on. I recognize that there is a role for nationally known people who are in leadership for people to know Who’s Who, but you know, you can go to your internet these days and just do a search and you get the information you need about pretty much anyone you need to know about.

David: How do you think they got your name, Karen?

Karen: I have no idea, but I have a little problem with the concept of Who’s Who in America and then I have a real problem with me having to write my own commendation. This actually invoked a lot of negativity at me about the whole concept of Who’s Who in America.

David: Well, basically they have written to you and said, will you feel you qualify to be in Who’s Who in America and we’re doing this special book? Is that how it reads?

Karen: Yes, something like that.

David: Do you have to pay something at all?

Karen: No, this one, there’s no fee.

David: Okay, but what they’ll do is to ask you to buy the books.

Karen: Yeah, buy the books, give them to your friends, of course.

David: And you know, the truth is for some people that could be very good.

Karen: It could be very valuable, but there’s an elitism that they don’t intend, I don’t believe, or maybe they do.

David: I’m sure they don’t.

Karen: But this whole concept evokes in me a feeling of negativity toward it, because my real personal conviction, and this is a conviction, is that the folk who make our country run are not necessarily the ones whose names we hear in our newscasts at night, or the ones that people write bios on or magazines.

David: Who get letters about Who’s Who?

Karen: Yeah, they’re the unknown folk. Well, someone people would call common people, but they’re not any of them common in the fact that they’re ordinary. But we do use that terminology to describe people who don’t get invited to be in the Who’s Who list. And in my later years, I have sort of a passion for those kinds of people. I just know how valuable they are.

David: You’re not saying all ordinary people are value, but you’re saying that there are certain people who don’t have a claim that much in terms of the world of publicity who do amazing things.

Karen: Yeah, amazing things. I think everyone has value, David, in God’s eyes for sure. And we need to be essentially trying to get God’s focus toward people we consider ordinary, because I think when you get down to the bottom of it, they’re all extraordinary in certain ways.

We just never see those things. So here’s an example. I was on a board, an international board, which was a development organization that had developed a teaching methodology. There are people on the field from all over. These with people with degrees. Some of them were literate or semi-literate. I mean, it was a really interesting group of leaders had developed a methodology where you would go into a village or some little unsung place, maybe not even on the map. And you would make connections with the people. And the goal of that organization was to teach local people that they had assets. They all had assets. Every village has an asset. If it’s nothing more than people who are strong enough to clear a brush out to make a road, everyone has an asset. And they empowered them then to define what their local problems were and then determine how their assets were going to solve those local problems, not wait for someone else to come and do it. And this was a remarkable thing. And this methodology has spread through development agencies all across the world.

I mean, it’s extraordinary what it’s done. But who started this? What’s the name of the guy or the gal who started it? One of the women I met is one of those extraordinary people. She had her degrees in biology and she was part of the team wherever they were working. And they actually, and all the things that they were developing, developed the way you take green ripe olives and you get a hole in them and stuff it with them. That’s made all kinds of money for someone in the food industry. But her name and her group’s name was never attached to it, nor did she particularly want it to be. So then the Lord began working in her life and she became a worker for this organization that I was in the board of. It was called Medical Ambassadors International. She would go into villages, a single woman in Muslim countries, but she was a Western woman. She was from America.

That in itself draws attention. And she’d go village to village and establish relationship and get to know who the leaders were. They had methods by which they would demonstrate how they could teach people how to take care of their own problems. And one was children who were underweight. You can go into a village and see that there’s a starvation problem.

And one of the ways they did that was you measure the upper arm with a tape and there’s a healthy dimension that determines whether a child is eating well or enough. So she would go into villages and she would begin with some of these methodologies to gather the people or the leaders together and say, no, we can teach your people how to…

David: Was she invited in or she just…

Karen: No, I think you go and you make your way. I mean, this isn’t what’s so extraordinary about it. So here she is, a Western woman working in Afghanistan in a very Muslim country that has rigorous roles that women are supposed to play. And she is to me a heroine and there’s been an extraordinary impact through her work alone because they’re training gifted people to the leaders in their own communities. She’s had an enormous impact in that part of the world and she goes into what I feel would be an area that’s fraught with danger for a woman like that in a way that does not stir up problems. She’s learning how to do that. Is she going to be in the who’s who in America?

David: We don’t know yet.

Karen: But I’m guessing probably not because her work is done overseas. But yet she’s one of those people that could be a model for all kinds of stuff that needs to go on our own country. So I look to the ordinary people and think in this group of people who the world doesn’t pay attention to, there is no focus on them. We need to get to the point where we recognize that many of those ordinary people are doing extraordinary things in their own little communities.

David: In some ways I’m trying to hear what you’re saying and I’m getting the impression that who is really to determine who’s who.

Karen: Yeah, who’s who. Our standards for that maybe are different than, well, let’s say the way that God measures who’s who in America.

David: Well, the lady illustration is not living in America.

Karen: No, but there are all kinds of examples I could draw. I mean, you hear of a young couple who’s living next to an elderly person who’s living alone in a home and they have adopted that older person. They call every day to make sure that person is okay and they include that person in family gatherings. This is extraordinary, David. I mean, I get choked up just thinking about it.

And then there are people who get neighborhood things going. Neighborhood meets and greets or come for dinner or you know, I mean, there’s there are people like this all over who.

David: So you’re really objecting to the standard.

Karen: Yeah, and the truth is you don’t know what the standard is. I don’t know what the standard is, but I’m guessing that it’s something that overlooks people like this.

David: Have you responded to the letter yet.

Karen: No, I haven’t and probably won’t or maybe I will. But the focus of a publication like that is not on the people I admire the most who are doing this kind of work in their local communities without attention. Someone may be involved in a not- for-profit and get a salary, but it’s never what they should be paid. And a lot of them do this work. They don’t receive any remuneration for what they do. They’re my heroes.

David: Are you going to write all of that to the who’s who in America?

Karen: No, they won’t be attentive to it.

David: I don’t think you’re saying and you react in a different way.

Karen: Yeah, it’s clarified to me why I reacted negatively and why that letter has sat on my desk.

David: Would you have been upset if they didn’t send you a letter and you knew that they sent the letter to other people?

Karen: No, not at all. I would say, oh, good. They probably deserved to be. These are negative reactions we have and we have to trace down why I’m feeling that way and it’s nothing to do with them. It’s just I have a different value in me that’s risen in the later years as far as who’s really important, who’s not really important.

David: And that’s the bottom line of what you’re trying to say.

Karen: Yeah, that’s what I’m trying to say.

David: The truth is, Karen, as I go back in Scripture in my mind and I’m responding now to your words, there is a certain hierarchy even in the church, even in Scripture. Paul says there are different gifts of the Holy Spirit and then he kind of lists them in a rank order.

Karen: He does.

David: Preaching I think is my prophesy. The prophecy and the miracles.

Karen: Yeah, I would like to have a discussion with Paul. I mean, maybe he needed a woman to dialogue with one who’s doing kitchen work and one who’s cleaning houses and caring for little kids.

David: I don’t think you’re going to get an opportunity to do that.

Karen: Okay, I’ll go with this in theory as long as we get on to some of the other verses of Scripture that do point to an egalitarian sort of an approach to humanity. You have some of those, I think, that you’ve found.

David: I’m kind of going at it a different way here. I don’t know how to judge those people who sense you the letter. Their motives may have been totally senseless.

Karen: Yes, I’m sure they are.

David: And I’m sure that there are some people who get overlooked all the time and that may be opportunity. It’s a little bit funny to say you then write your own, it’s not a bio, but your own piece. And that’s a little bit…

Karen: Recommendation, you know, whatever.

David: Well, yeah, your accomplishment. Yeah, your accomplishment, yeah. That bothers me a little. I don’t know, there could have been a very fine motive, which says there are a lot of people who should be recognized and they never are because the echelon of the Almighty is very small. We’ve figured out where you are in your head and basically I’m just trying to help you to be cautious.

Karen: So that’s a reactionary.

David: Cautious. And I mean, you have the opportunity to just ignore the letter or you have the opportunity to write a steamer, whatever you want to do.

Karen: I see your Bible is open. So what does that mean, honey?

David: Well, it means that I’m trying to say I’m not sure where my wife is going on this and is there an alternative. And because I knew you wrote this in Soulish Food when it first came up.

Karen: The little newsletter I sent out to friends.

David: By the way, some people might be interested in getting it. How often do you write those?

Karen: Trying to do it every couple of weeks.

David: Okay. So every couple of weeks and there’s no charge to it.

Karen: No.

David: So you’re one of the little humble servants of Jesus.

Karen: Yeah, I love doing it.

David: What if somebody would like to get that? How did they do that?

Karen: Well, Dean will give our email address at the end of our podcast and they can just email me and I’ll get them on the list. But it’s our newsletter. It’s called Soulish Food.

David: Okay. Here’s my attempt to come up with an alternative way of thinking. Everybody is going to be judged, but not by us. They’ll be judged by God. In fact, in Romans, Paul says, why do you judge one another? Because all of you are going to be judged. You will all stand before God’s judgment seat. So, he’s the one who is going to decide who is acceptable and good and so on. That same thought is given in 1 Corinthians. For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ that each one may receive what is due to him for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad.

So there is an account being made of all of this and that’s being made by the one who is qualified to do that. Then I get this kind of a scary feel in the book of Revelation. This is in chapter 20. Then I saw a great white throne and him who was seated on it. Earth and sky fled from his presence and there was no place for them. And I saw the dead great and small standing before the throne and the books were open. And the dead were judged according to what they had done as recorded in the books. So, the day will come when there is an evaluation and more than that a judgment as to how someone lived. This is a sentence.

Karen: A theme sentence.

David: Okay. I force us to do this.

Karen: This is good. But this is good communication work.

David: We do well to live in a way that pleases God because a time is coming when he will judge everyone fairly and with finality. In other words, nobody’s going to question this and nobody’s going to say, “Okay, let’s take a second run at it.” It’s over. This is his opinion as to what is going on. We would do well to live in a way that pleases God who we know is loving and fair and wise and so on. So the day will come. There is a who’s who that is being written in the sky of heaven.

Who’s who? And I think that we want to be aware of what we will be judged upon.

Karen: So I think that’s extremely helpful. I think the measurement that we need to be attempting to achieve is not am I pleasing to man, but what am I doing that is advancing the Lord’s work? How am I living in deed and in attitude?

David: In my relationship to him and to others.

Karen: And to others that is pleasing to him. What things would he say to me and does it probably is nudging me anyway through his Holy Spirit and through other people saying things to us and through the scripture. This is where you need to improve. And that’s the standard of success that we need to be attempting to achieve. And it’s so easy, David, as humans to slip into another value system, a more human value system, whether it’s approval from friends or whether it’s our church recognizing who we are and what we’ve done. It doesn’t matter, but we need to ask ourselves, how does God feel about what I’m doing?

And if we feel like we’re pleasing him, doing our best to do that, not to earn his approval, but to please him because we love him and he loves us, then we have achieved the success that the Christian needs to be attempting to achieve rather than the standards that the world set up for us.

David: So my advice to you would be if you go to the mailbox and you pull the lid down and there are trumpets that sound and if you look and there’s a letter that is vibrating, the light is coming out. You treat that with great respect.

Karen: I promise you I will.

David: Once you have come running into the house and say, David, David, look at what has come. How come you didn’t get one of these?

Karen: I have a suspicion you’re expecting me to write. Who’s who and say, how come you didn’t include my husband in this? He’s setting up some conversations in our family.

David: I think that your hesitation is good. There’s so much that is not Christian in the world and I just want to make sure that your response doesn’t necessarily have to be someone else’s.

Karen: No, I agree. This is a personal thing that I’m working on, but I do think we each have our problematic areas in the area of being known and being valued. And so we need to work through it in the very same way that we have. How am I functioning where I am experiencing the fact that what I’m doing is pleasing to God and that He is the one who values me, the most important one who values me. Am I sitting in a place where I’m understanding that He sees what I’m doing? He could shout a great hurrah He would, but He is giving us inner affirmation.

David: What if He did shout that great hurrah?

Karen: We’d be scared to death.

David: Well, you’d be scared, but you’d also, the rest of your life, say, you know, I got a hurrah.

Karen: That’s what I got a hurrah. I got a hurrah.

David: Did you see that on my suit coat here? Oh, you didn’t look at it long enough. It’s pulsating. Did you notice that? Yeah, it’s a really tough one, isn’t it?

Karen: Yeah, it is. But this stuff we need to work through. So it’s a good conversation. Honey, thanks for talking with me.

David: Yeah, can I just do that sentence one more time? And it’s in case somebody listening had to answer the phone while we were saying that, okay? We do well to live in a way that pleases God because the time is coming when He will judge everyone fairly and with finality, including you, Karen, and including me, David.

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