The Road to Hope

Civil Rights leaders knew the power of suffering Photo by History in HD on Unsplash

I spend much of my days shoring up that I do not suffer. I take aspirin. I work hard to ensure my kids are quite and not yelling. I turn the news off that I don’t want to see. I time my driving so to avoid traffic. I delay sharing bad or unwelcome news with others. I order things online so I do not have to go to the store. I look for the shortest lines.

Recently this line came through WeCroak: “Our avoidance instinct is also due to the fact that our culture has decided that suffering has no value.” (original source)

As a human I work to avoid suffering but as a Christian I know that suffering has immense value. As Paul writes:

And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.- Romans 5:3-5 (NRSV)

Paul seems to suggest that suffering is the road to hope. It is a road less traveled in my life.

I live in a bubble wrapped existence where the extent of my suffering is a power outage for a few hours or failing to meet some arbitrary expectation. I can imagine that many of us in the Church in the United States also do not suffer much at all. Which of course begs the question - if we suffer little do we hope for less?

Proximity over Proselytizing

I have never been a very good proselytizer. For one, I am not sure I think it is a very good idea to force people to change religions because I think that I have found the Truth. On the other hand I also believe that the world is in need of a savior and that Jesus Christ has saved and transformed my life. It is Good News that I desire to share and find it unethical not to share with someone this Good News that found me.

So many of us do not know what to do with the action of proselytizing too because it has been used in very harmful ways. Converting people has been justification to promote all sorts of harmful things from colonialism to white supremacy, from slavery to angry Christians yelling “turn or burn”. Christian conversion has a bit of a baggage.

So what is one to do with the commandment to make disciples? Are we to ignore this Great Commission of Christ?

Rather than proselytizing, perhaps Christianity should focus on proximity.

Photo by Zach Vessels on Unsplash

As I read the Gospel stories of Jesus, he is most able to convert hearts to the kingdom of God not by proselytizing them, but by being in close proximity to them. He befriends the tax collector and the sinner. He shakes hands with the scandalous and allows the unclean to touch him. He elevates children and honors women. Just being in his presence, being in proximity to him, Jesus converts many.

It is not that we are to avoid the Great Commission to make disciples. It is that we are to be aware of how we do this. We follow Jesus who did not proselytize the non-converted but was in proximity with all.

God Winks and Blinks

Recently I received a letter and the author shared a story. The person described a series of events and then concluded that the sequence of events was what they might call a “God wink”. Some people might encounter the same sequence of events and see no connection, only random and serendipity at play. And maybe that is all that it is, random.

This is where cultural anthropology might be helpful.

Clifford Geertz is a Anthropologist who argues that anyone studying a culture needs to have a “thick description” of that culture. The thick description gives robust descriptions of behaviors with the hopes that the anthropologist might understand the significance of these behaviors. It was described to me that a thick description is being able to tell the difference between a wink and a blink. The movements are the same, but the meaning is different.

While one person might see someone randomly blinking their eyes, the one who has sat with this culture does not see random blinks, but winks of communication.

Photo by Conner Ching on Unsplash

If I can stretch the metaphor just bit more: It takes a long time to develop a thick description of a culture. You have to sit, listen, observe and watch. It takes years of intentional work to learn a new human culture and even then there is still more to discover.

Maybe the actions of the world or in the relayed story are random blinks, I don’t know. What I do know is that I am only now beginning to discern that God winks.