I've been riding my little Yamaha 250 about three years now. So when a big bike down the street popped up for sale, I decided to check it out. It was a beautiful, custom built Vulcan 1500. I had no idea what I was getting into.
I knew the bike was bigger. I understood that intellectually. And I thought all the riding on mine had prepared me. It hadn't. The weight was so different. The smoothness of the ride was so different. And the power... my oh my, the power. You can do the math, six times bigger, but feeling the math is a whole different story.
Sometimes I think we can treat missionaries the same way I treated that Vulcan. They live in a city, so do I. They work in an office, so do I. Their kids go to school, play sports, get into band, mine too!
So when a missionary returns to the U.S. for a visit or to stay, we can look at their lives and our lives and think, "We're both motorcycles."
And it's true. There are many similarities in our lives and how we live them. But what we miss is the level of "static" can be exponentially higher. Cross-cultural, emotional and spiritual noise is at a level we can know intellectually but is hard to truly understand if we haven't felt it.
A missionary friend in Kenya had a pastor say to him, "We do the same things. We're both in ministry. It's just you do it over there and I do it here in the U.S." After a moment my friend said, "That's true. But don't ever imagine the cost is the same."
When we connect with missionaries, when we connect with anyone, we need to remember that our stories may sound similar, but we really don't understand their context. Life, love and loss are all deeply personal experiences. We can only hope to understand when we take the time to set aside our own story and listen.
I knew the bike was bigger. I understood that intellectually. And I thought all the riding on mine had prepared me. It hadn't. The weight was so different. The smoothness of the ride was so different. And the power... my oh my, the power. You can do the math, six times bigger, but feeling the math is a whole different story.
Sometimes I think we can treat missionaries the same way I treated that Vulcan. They live in a city, so do I. They work in an office, so do I. Their kids go to school, play sports, get into band, mine too!
So when a missionary returns to the U.S. for a visit or to stay, we can look at their lives and our lives and think, "We're both motorcycles."
And it's true. There are many similarities in our lives and how we live them. But what we miss is the level of "static" can be exponentially higher. Cross-cultural, emotional and spiritual noise is at a level we can know intellectually but is hard to truly understand if we haven't felt it.
A missionary friend in Kenya had a pastor say to him, "We do the same things. We're both in ministry. It's just you do it over there and I do it here in the U.S." After a moment my friend said, "That's true. But don't ever imagine the cost is the same."
When we connect with missionaries, when we connect with anyone, we need to remember that our stories may sound similar, but we really don't understand their context. Life, love and loss are all deeply personal experiences. We can only hope to understand when we take the time to set aside our own story and listen.
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