I have been following NEWSTART® Insights on Facebook for a couple a weeks now. I am careful not to express my own opinions but rather just to ask questions, to try to start (or add to) conversations. There was this person, Terri Gleadell Wallace, who posted, said she had never attended a NEWSTART® session but had put together a syllabus, she called it, on each of the eight facets of the lifestyle. And she wanted to share it.
It was a very complex, organized listing of links primarily to videos that were on the newstart.org website, and some to a place called Amazing Health, and some to a YouTube site on finances. I commented that she looked very organized. Since she called it a syllabus, I assumed she was a dietitian or nutritionist. Nope, she just wrote this for herself. Before I found that out, however, I made the mistake of asking her how she might modify this for a diabetic. Her answer was very cold and clinical, stating that I should ask my doctor about that. Whereupon I shot back that most doctors don’t know very much about nutrition.
Well, I kept asking questions and that apparently made her very uncomfortable and defensive. Her answers were brief and terse. Finally, she had had it with me and told me she thought this discussion group was a place to share and not to ask questions. Not to ask questions! Instinctively, I shot back, “Well, it’s not like I’m questioning the doctrines of the church!” She became livid and totally removed her long and involved initial post, along with the long and involved thread that had followed it. I then posted a comment below the moderator’s pinned post that said, “Are we allowed to ask questions here?” In a few minutes after that, I saw that she had left the group!
It occurred to me immediately how very much like The Church that Terri Gleadell Wallace was being: wanting to “share” what she had compiled but not wanting to be asked questions about it. I wondered if this was a harbinger of things to come on NEWSTART® Insights.
