Accepting Different

Early in my marriage my wife and I were returning home from church. She happened to be driving and when she took a route different from the one I usually took I told her she was going the wrong way. She pointed out she was going a different way but that didn't make it wrong. Being young, stupid and strong willed I picked a fight insisting that her way was both different and wrong. It was, as you can imagine, a nasty little fight that didn't end well. And you'd think I would've let it go and realized that she was right. Different in certain settings may be wrong but in most cases different is just different. But I actually drove both routes and timed them to prove that my route was shorter and, therefore, the right way to go. I found out there was little difference in travel time between the two.

To this day it's hard for me to learn lessons, and sometimes painful. If we are to reverse benevolent oppression we must give up our conviction about there being one right way to do things. The simple truth is that we in the American Christian church are as much affected by our culture as people anywhere else in the world are by theirs. Our freedoms, affluence, governmental system, technological advancements and other influences form our opinion of ourselves and the world we live in. It also helps form our definition of right and wrong. Yes, we seek truth in God's Word, but even our understanding of truth found in scripture is colored by the culture in which we've grown up.

This is a huge handicap when it comes time for us to help people in other cultures. This handicap can be mitigated if we are aware it exists. If you are bristling right now at my suggestion that our ways are not right when all I'm saying is our ways are different then it might be hard for you to engage with other cultures. I've certainly met people who are eager to do the equivalent of driving both routes to prove that the American way is more expedient. To those folks I would say that expedience is often not the goal in other cultures so, from the outset, your measure of right and wrong is flawed.

If you can embrace the truth that there is more than one right way to do things and celebrate those who do things differently to achieve the same goal, then you have a fighting chance at changing the way we do charity. Absolute right and absolute wrong does exist. However, it is much more rare than any of us imagine. We need to be much, much more careful about using those labels and become much, much more comfortable accepting different.

This is one more step on our road to reversing benevolent oppression.