We have two boys, seven and two. Our eldest is like most other seven year olds, I imagine. He is able to express a wide range of emotions but there is a limit on his ability to put to words to the more complex emotions. While he has grown these years he has gotten much better and more comfortable at talking about his feelings. However, there are still times when he grows so frustrated because he cannot come up with the words and so he yells. My wife and I try to work with him to calm down and talk about what he is feeling in order to get him to practice talking about what is going on in his head.
In our minds, this practice is essential in order to be a functioning human being. You cannot be an adult and just yell when you are frustrated or angry. You cannot just shut down and not talk about things that are important to you.
And yet, this is a problem with out time. Adults are in social settings and not talking about religion and politics. That is we are a bunch of adults who are not practicing talking about the things that are important to us.
No wonder we have adults yelling about politics on the television and adults yelling about religion on the street corner and adults who are so turned off by all this yelling that they shut off the news and don't engage in religion. Bottom line, we are people who are biologically adults but we are like seven year olds - yelling or shutting down when we don't know how to express ourselves.
For all that evangelism is made out to be, it really is just faith sharing. It is practicing talking about religion and the things that matter. As the saying goes, if we want people to stop yelling all the time and talk about the things that matter, then we have to being with our own selves. We have to "be the change."