Reaching across the gap
As someone who teaches God's word to others, you have to let go of the idea that you have all the answers. You have to stop talking every once in a while and just listen. You have to stop giving answers before you really understand the questions.
Last week was a wonderful opportunity to practice this. I was teaching our students about the character of God. Wow! What a huge subject to cover in one week!
We got right to work digging into some of my favorite stories from the Bible. Stories are great vehicles for truth. Everyone can understand them, and one story can contain huge amounts of truth. We spent two days on that. After hearing all those stories we felt as if we had been immersed in a deep, sweet river of God's truth.
Jesus really is the answer. He really is the truth. If we look deep into who he is, will be find the answer we need, even for the very real problems we see around us every day.
So on the last day of our class, we had the group make a list of problems that they see in their community. Some chose to focus on the neighborhood here in Chepo, other chose to talk about the villages they grew up in. Their answers and the resulting discussion was like a glimpse into the soul of their communities.
As the list of problems on the whiteboard grew, Malana, one of the few non-Wounaan in the room, made a comment.
"When we were asked to think of problems we see in the community, the first thing that came to my mind were physical things: lack of clean water, disease, lack of sufficient employment, etc. But all the problems you guys mentioned were focused on relational problems: Lack of leadership for the communities, poor education for the children, youth making bad decisions, lack of interest in God and his word."
She was right, and they were right. The deepest poverty is the relational poverty. The need for food can be satiated by a simple meal. But the lack of good relationships takes long, hard work to resolve. There is no quick-fix.
The discussion went into the roots of these problems, and then, the truths in God's word that address them. It didn't take long for the discussion to go pretty deep. Obviously these we things that had already put a lot of thought into. Why was the community in general not interested in God? They began to talk about a myriad of problems that concerned them in the local church. As I listened not only to their ideas, but their hearts to see their communities changed, to see them healthy and growing, I felt privileged to be trusted with this.
And the thought came to me, "What if I never took the time to ask? What if I just continued on giving MY answers to questions that they aren't even asking?"
To reach across this cultural gap, we must be willing, I must be willing to become a little child. I must be willing to ask questions, to not have the answers, to say, "what do YOU think." I must also be willing to tolerate silence, and embrace answers that aren't a quick fix.
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