This week I visited Lori at her office and asked for suggestions of books I should read or look into before traveling with the team to Nicaragua in August. She handed me a book by Duane Elmer entitled Cross Cultural Servanthood. Today I was reading through chapter two which deals with Acceptance of others:
Social research says that the most frequent response Americans make to a situation is to evaluate what they just saw or heard as right or wrong, good or bad. Usually the standard for such judgements is how similar or dissimilar it is to me and my beliefs. We often use ourselves as the norm by which to measure others. If they measure up, we accept them; if not, we try to change them (one form of rejection) or distance ourselves from them (another form of rejection).
Elmer had given a very powerful example of the challenges he had experienced in accepting others earlier in the chapter. While teaching at a Christian College in Chicago, Elmer and his friend, Mark, would walk the streets at night to observe the community around them and learn their mission field. Elmer records the following:
Walking with Mark one night, I noticed a lady at the corner ahead. She was scantily clad. I turned to him and said in a voice the lady would not hear, "Is she a prostitute?" He paused; I remember thinking, Why the pause? It's obvious. Then he said firmly, "No! That is not a prostitute. That is a person... in prostitution." His profound statement affects me to this day.
When I saw this woman, I saw a prostitute. When Mark saw her, he saw a human being.
What do you think Jesus would have seen?
What made the difference in our perceptions? I tended to categorize people-homeless, drunk, drug addict, prostitute, pimp, panhandler- then I would know how to treat them: respectable vocation brings respect; disrespectful vocation brings disrespect. I decided who to accept not by the fact that they were made in the image of God but by the kind of life they were living. Mark, however, saw the image of God in everyone in spite of their activity.
I would love to tell you I don't do this- that I don't pass a homeless person on the side of the road and see their circumstance before I see them. I want to tell you that I don't evaluate people based on the way they speak. I would sincerely love to tell you that I have never fostered feelings of superiority when I see someone wearing ill-fitting clothes with leathery skin holding onto a half-lit cigarette at the bus stop. But the truth is I've done all of that and harbored all of these thoughts. If you were to ask me if I thought myself better than any of these people, I would tell you no. The truth is rather that I look at all of these people and I thank God for what I have. But what I realized today is that many times I'm saying, "God thank you that I am not that person. Thank you that I don't look like that, live like that." I am not praying to thank God for the blessings in my life but rather for allowing me not to be that person. I realized that I don't accept the people I see on a daily basis in my community who struggle and are different from myself. I am as much in need of a savior as anyone. It is something we all share: we are unified in need of grace, forgiveness and the mercy God gives us all.
