This morning, it was good to be back at our home church. A supportive hugging bunch they are!
We were given opportunity to talk about our training experience in a small group setting. Totally impromptu, but that’s fine with us. We were grateful for the time to share what we know God has been doing in and around us this month and hope it enables our precious supporters to better know how to pray not just for us, but for church work in general. With all the new concepts and ideas filtering through our brains, the more complicated some things seem, and the harder it is to speak in terms of certainties and with clarity. So we hope we didn’t confuse anyone this morning, in addition to stealing all the time away from teaching time! Of course, if you are event-oriented like me, as opposed to time-oriented, nothing was stolen. Time-oriented folks. . . might feel short-changed.
This is just one of the many tensions that exist in crossing cultures -going from a time oriented culture to an event oriented culture. Wrong? Unbiblical? Different? Are people more important than schedules? Or vice versa?
Of course, you can’t ride in to a new culture like the cavalry and assume that all your cultural ways are right, imposing your value system on people who have different value systems for very legitimate reasons. After all, aren’t we legitimately time-oriented in the US? We have industry and time clocks and watches on nearly every wrist. We have opportunity to schedule a million things into our American days and we must keep a tight schedule to enjoy our million things – or at least, to enable the million things to happen. If we are in too long a line, or a friend has a long story to tell, isn’t there the tendency to look at the watch, look again, huff and puff a little. . .well, you get the picture. In the life of a follower of Christ, what does this behavior say about God? Is he in a hurry? Always efficient, taking the shortest route as a means to an end? It seems to me, God is not in a hurry and His economy of time is not like mine. Biblical worldview – or cultural worldview? Sending some fog your way. . .
