Shut up
I was listening to a Ted Talks podcast last week and I just knew I would
need to write about it on the Blog. Here is the link. it is well worth
taking 20 minutes and listening to it.
This awesome Italian sets forth the truly monumental arrogance and ignorance we can portray when we go to "help" people we feel "need" our help. While he was talking about the western world's tendency to be ignorantly helpful in the third world I thought it was very relevant to how Christians treat everyone else on the planet.
A definition of madness is to do the same thing over and over again and expect a different result. Christianity has been doing this for years now.
We arrogantly and ignorantly arrive somewhere without an invitation to a place or a people group and proceed to "instruct" them on how to live their lives properly. We have no idea about the "Hippos" that are sitting quietly and unseen in the river and we never bother to ask the local people why it is they act the way they do. We simply roll up our sleeves and begin planting crops to fix the problem all the while thinking how stupid these people are not to have done so before we arrived. Then as the days pass we find all of our work has been consumed by the unseen herd of Hippos that come out on a regular basis in this place.
If you are a Christian and you are even a little curious how you might go about communicating to people who are not Christian my suggestion is that you shut your mouth and listen to those people tell you about the "Hippos" in their world and if you can manage to keep your mouth shut long enough they might, eventually ask you for an opinion about how to face the challenges they struggle with. Even if they never ask you, at least you have the advantage of actually knowing them rather than ignoring them!
In our small world of YLC St. Louis the first rule is to "shut up" and the second is to "open your mind"
to what other people believe. Creating a mindset among Christians that
the best thing we could possibly do in restoring our credibility in the
eyes of the rest of humanity is merely to start by shutting up seems to
be an almost impossible mission. We have a Pavlovian-like need to tell
everyone else where it is they are wrong and how we could fix them if
they would just let us!
Who have you been "talking at" recently and how hard does it seem to simply shut up and listen to them instead?
My name is Robert Millar and I have many Hippos in my life...... have you ever taken the time to shut up long enough to really ask someone like me, who I am and why I behave the way I do?
Comments
Post a Comment