Jesus Christ Blog

Peace is never found in walking away from our fears, but in walking into them.

For more visit, PDlife.com.

Teach me who you are

by John Fischer

“Where can we have the intimate conversations that keep all of us from each other? Is it possible that we can be a safe place for individuals to just talk? What we really want to say to people is: ‘I care about you. You are worth fighting for. Please teach me who you are.’” — Becky Kuhn

Becky Kuhn is a physician who works with HIV-positive individuals, and her statement is part of an awareness of HIV/AIDS that Kay Warren is trying to create among purpose driven churches as executive director of Saddleback’s HIV/AIDS Initiative. Kay’s goal is to make the church a safe place to talk about HIV/AIDS. She knows that’s a tough assignment.

“As you begin to talk about HIV, remember the important question is not how someone got HIV,” Kay says. “The fact is many have it. The important question is: ‘How can we serve those who have HIV?’”

If we could just get the impact of Becky’s statement: Teach me who you are, we would all embark on a wealth of learning not only among people living with HIV, but in all our relationships.

What I’m thinking about here is having an attitude of learning from every individual I come across. It’s ultimately a way of serving people. Think about it. If I come to you with the attitude, “Teach me who you are,” what does that say about you and me? It says that I don’t fully know who you are. You exist outside my knowledge and experience of people. You could very well be outside my comfort zone. Most of all, you are different, and that poses a challenge to me. I can’t assume that you are like me. Coming to know you may change the way I think. What if I find out you exist outside my categories of people? What if I find out that I actually like you when I am not supposed to based on social or religious prejudices? What am I going to do then? It puts me in a very vulnerable place to ask you to teach me about who you are.

To say: “Teach me who you are” automatically makes me a learner. I’m not only willing to be exposed to you; I want to learn from you. I want to sit at your feet. I want you to tell me what your life is like. I want to know what the world looks like to you – what I look like to you. What is it like standing inside your shoes?

How about trying it today? If we walked around with the attitude: “Teach me who you are,” even to those we think we know well, I bet we’d all be in for a big surprise.

For more information about the HIV/AIDS Initiative, click here.

Click the link below to view. If it does not open when you click it, copy and paste it into your browser.

http://www.theinterviewwithgod.com/

Granddad has had a triple bypass, walks a little slow, but still fiddles with his 1956 Ford pickup, which he continues to enter in car shows. His daughter says it’s part of how he keeps himself young.

One uncle was a heavy-set man with spiked hair and a Harley Davidson logo on his shirt. He spends the weekends on his motorcycle. He kept to himself, mostly, but was up-front and vocal during the service. If I threw out a rhetorical question, he fired back an answer!

Then there was a close friend of the mother who had recently returned from a trip to Vegas with her three gorgeous daughters, one of whom sang a song at the reception as evidence of her desire to become the next American Idol. They were offset by three 20-something male cousins, all in black T-shirts and black hair. Dad and his brother are natives of Mexico, still coping with the suicide of their mother, and Mom does eyebrows and lashes at a nearby salon. That’s where my wife befriended her and volunteered me for duty.

And the star of the show? Sixteen-month-old Isabella Vita.

I’m referring to a baby dedication this weekend that my wife roped me into leading, and as I stood in front of this group of mostly strangers in an outdoor courtyard in record heat, I wondered about how she does it. What had she gotten me into this time? I’d never done a baby dedication before, and I’d never been known as “Reverend” either, but I accepted it because it was important to Isabella’s family.

For the formal part of the service, I followed a script I got off the Internet, and when it came to the vows from the congregation to help the parents bring up their child in the love and instruction of the Lord, it initially asks a very pointed question of the individuals in the congregation as to their own faith. I realized I was taking a certain risk including this public request for response in a small group of 25 mostly family and friends. What if it was followed by silence?

“Do you hereby declare yourselves to be the children of God because you trust in Jesus Christ alone for the forgiveness of sins and the gift of eternal life? If this is true, please respond by saying, ‘We do.’”

“We do!” came the immediate and overwhelming affirmative that almost bowled me over, and the Harley guy was the loudest. It took my breath away and left me speechless for a few seconds. The reaction was so boisterous; it was everything I could do to keep from bursting into tears.

Somehow that moment seemed to capture a little bit of Heaven for me. At least what I have imagined Heaven to be like from reading the Gospels – a gathering of people whom I, at first glance, would probably not guess as being Heaven-bound. And whenever this happens, it hits me once again between the eyes. I am the one who doesn’t deserve to be there, not them.

I’m just grateful they found a way to accept me anyway.

 Believe in what you know God told you, in spite of the fact that not everyone received the same information.

“God is too good to be unkind, too wise to make mistakes, and too deep to explain himself.” - Unknown

Have you ever thought about the fact that God doesn’t have to explain himself? Or as Paul put it, “Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor?” (Romans 11:34)

Think about how often we ask or hear the following:

Why did God allow this thing to happen to me?

Why would God allow such pain and suffering on this planet?

If there is a God, why doesn’t he do something about the injustice in the world?

And then think about our attempts at answering these questions while God remains silent. We not only throw questions and challenges at him, we have the audacity to think we can speak for him as well!

The worst part about this is that we act as if we deserve answers to these and similar questions. We even go so far as to suspend belief in God until we get these questions resolved to our satisfaction. Wait a minute: This is the God of the universe we are talking about. Who do we think we are? Some of this is almost on the level of grabbing a teenager by the ear, sitting him down in a chair, and saying, “Well … aren’t you going to explain yourself, young man?”

What we are missing here is a relative level of humility commensurate with some acknowledgment of who we are (and are not) and who God is. In whose book is God required to explain himself? Not in any book I know of.

Moreover, in the book he left for us, the Bible, one of its oldest stories is about a righteous and good man who was afflicted with severe loss, pain, and suffering for no apparent reason. For the bulk of the book of Job, Job listens to four friends trying to figure out his predicament. After 37 chapters of justifications, accusations, and defense, they are no closer to an answer than when they started. That’s when God shows up on the scene and speaks for himself. And in four more chapters, he refuses to give one shred of evidence that he intends to answer their questions. What he does present them is a series of more questions that Job, in his finiteness cannot answer – questions that establish himself as God with no requirement to explain himself, and Job, as a mere man with limited understanding and no right to know.

In the end, Job utters these words: “You asked, ‘Who is this that questions my wisdom with such ignorance?’ It is I – and I was talking about things I knew nothing about, things far too wonderful for me … I had only heard about you before, but now I have seen you with my own eyes. I take back everything I said, and I sit in dust and ashes to show my repentance.” (Job 42:3, 5-6 NLT)

One of the most fundamental steps of believing is deciding we are not God nor do we want to be. That’s when we get down on our knees and worship God as God. That posture is the beginning of finding out.

Growing up as a Christian left me with a certain amount of unnecessary baggage to unload along the way. It’s easy to get things wrong about following Jesus, especially when you give more significance to what Christians think than to what Jesus and the Bible actually teach.

For instance, I have become quite familiar with dividing people into two different camps signified by the terms Christian and non-Christian – terms which are not even used in the Bible. But Paul exhibited a different way of thinking about people when he wrote in his second letter to the church in Corinth, “For we are to God the aroma of Christ among those who are being saved and those who are perishing.” (2 Corinthians 2:15, italics added.)

The first thing to notice here is that everyone is in the process of fulfilling an ultimate destiny beyond anything you or I can know. As followers of Christ, we are told to simply be the fragrance of Christ to everybody, without distinction.

The reason for this, I’m sure, is because if everyone is in the process of either being saved or perishing, there is no way anyone can ultimately know if a person is not a Christian. A person I might correctly label as a non-Christian today could very well be in the process of being saved tomorrow. No one is ultimately beyond the reach of God, and there’s always that last breath when someone can come to terms with God without anyone ever knowing.

So here’s the bottom line of this at least for me. I can be pretty sure about people who are Christians through sharing the oneness of the Spirit, but I don’t have a clue about who is not, so best to stay out of the destiny business and leave that up to God. And how about taking that one step further? Since I don’t know who is ultimately not a Christian, why not treat everybody as if they were – as Paul said – in the process of being saved? I figure if I am right, I will be in some way helping someone along his or her journey. And if I am wrong, what harm will I have done by loving and encouraging someone toward the truth who is ultimately headed away from God? I have found this way of thinking makes for a more simplified mission and a consistently positive emphasis. Whatever spark you find in anyone toward God, however weak it might be, fan it. Feed it some spiritual oxygen. Encourage people along on their journey.

This also means that I don’t really know anyone who I can be sure is a non-Christian. If I do know non-Christians, I don’t know who they are, and I’m glad that I don’t have to know. Until God finishes his business with all of us, I will encourage all I meet to come to know about his free gift of salvation, that they might all be saved.