From the mundane to the divine and the ridiculous to the sublime

You just never know what a day will hold. This week in the office hasn’t exactly ranked as one of the most interesting, as I’ve spent most of it dealing with rather mundane matters – administrative preparation for a workshop and drafting a budget for the next fiscal year. One day, I was doing just that, when two of my colleagues returned to the office from having been out helping a relative who had been wrongly imprisoned. They brought the relative with them, and explained that as they left the prison they had been able to share the gospel with him, using his release from captivity to freedom as an illustration of what Christ has done for us. Nothing like making the most of every opportunity. After talking to the man some more, he wanted to become a follower of Jesus, so there and then, in the office, my colleague led him in a prayer and we all prayed over him. From budgets to salvation, from the mundane to the divine!

Yesterday I left work under an ominous looking sky. Sure enough, the thunder rumbled and halfway home I had to take shelter under a tree where I continued to get wet, despite my huge umbrella. When the tropical downpour eased to torrential rain, I ventured out as otherwise I may have been stuck there a very long time! I nervously crossed the bridge over the river only to be confronted by a waterfall instead of the steps that I normally climb. There was no way I could get up there, so I had to turn round and take a longer route. My trainers were fill of dirty water and my skirt clung to my legs. I have never been happier to get home and change! Unfortunately, I found my bed had a big wet patch on it and some books in the lounge were also damp. The leaks on my roof obviously hadn’t been fixed as promised! The rain you get here really is ridiculous, and right now, there’s plenty of it!! In the evening I had some friends round to eat pancakes and watch ‘Anne of Green Gables’ – perhaps that can’t quite be called ‘sublime’ but it was certainly fun.

I wonder what will happen next week?!

Impressions from a trip to the Ndali language area

Banana trees, mountains, red soil, rice and beans, ‘Mwagona’, rough roads, sacrifice and hardship. These were the impressions left on my mind by a trip to Isoko last week, a village in the Ndali language area (a five hour drive from Mbeya). Although it is just a village, it is a hive of activity as the district hospital is located there, powered by hydro electricity. The purpose of my visit was to train Sunday School teachers (assisted by two colleagues from Mbeya). Twenty attended the workshop, some having travelled some distance from neighbouring villages, who then stayed overnight in Isoko for the duration of the workshop. Our Literacy / Scripture Use Coordinator for the Ndali language area, has a bike ride of 11km over rough roads to get to Isoko, which he does every day that he needs to be in the language office. This is just one example of the hardships to be faced living in a such a remote area. As I talked to him further I learned more of his life and how he came to be a pastor – it was amazing to see how God has led him since his childhood, and I found it personally very challenging to hear of the sacrifices he made in the process. His parents couldn’t afford to put him through secondary school so, encouraged by the church where he was already taking leadership responsibilities while still in his early teens, he headed to Bible college. Although he got some help with the funds he needed for this, he also wove baskets well into the night in order to sell them to help pay his fees. This makes me think, how much do we value the education that we have received? How much would I be willing to sacrifice to gain further education to help me in my job?

The workshop itself went well, with the participants actively engaging in what we taught, but as usual they really struggled to find the main teaching point of a Bible passage and to think how to teach that to children. Once again, I found myself asking God, “What can we do? How can we help people to grow in a knowledge of God’s Word? How can these teachers teach children the Bible effectively, if they themselves do not know your Word and don’t receive good teaching in the church?” Some of the teachers didn’t even have a Bible, yet alone any other resources! (We took books to sell, including Bibles, as they have no other way of accessing these resources other than to take the bus-converted-from-a-lorry public transport to nearby towns over four hours away). Despite this, I hope and pray that they will all have learned a few new skills that will help them in their role as Sunday school teachers, and if nothing more, they will have been encouraged that what they are doing is important and will have gained a new vision for their work.

Isoko itself is a beautiful place, and our Coordinator there took us for walks to show us more of the area – hence my impressions of mountains, red soil and banana trees! I loved the community village feel – the Coordinator seemed to know everyone and had a word to say to just about everyone we met! (‘Mwagona’ is the first greeting you make in the Ndali language).

And finally you might be wondering what the ‘rice and beans’ is about. For six out of the seven meals that we ate on the trip, we had rice and beans! I confess to taking my own little supply of food for breakfast – snack bars, bananas and Ribena! While I would choose beans over greasy meat stew any day, by the sixth time I had definitely lost my appetite for them!

Worldview

Have you ever borrowed somebody else’s sunglasses and been surprised at how yellow (or pink, or red, or blue…) the world looks, when you had always thought that the world had a definite brownish hint? We all look at the world around us through different coloured glasses. The different colours are our different worldviews. Have you ever thought about how your upbringing in a particular culture that is underlined by a particular worldview affects how you see everything? It affects how you view society, how you view relationships, how you view time, the cosmos, the mind, morality etc.

I work in an office where Tanzanians, Europeans and Americans work closely side by side. This week and next we are holding a workshop at our office to help our Tanzanian colleagues understand the way we (Europeans and Americans) think, as well as various other things (such as helping them understand Wycliffe better, team building etc). As part of that, we have been thinking about the differing worldviews that we come from, and today I had the dubious privilege of being the teacher and talking about secularism and God’s Word. As I prepared for this, I was struck again by just how much our understanding of our faith is actually affected by the worldview of the society in which we grew up. When I read the Bible, I read it through my secularism spectacles, whether I mean to or not, as they are impossible to take off completely. Equally, my African colleagues read the Bible and act out their faith through the worldview of their environment, which is primarily animistic. It is impossible to acquire a purely Christian/Bible based worldview, because we don’t ‘acquire’ a worldview, we grow up in a worldview and imbibe it subconsciously. Most of my colleagues have grown up in Christian families, but despite that, we can all see how our secularist worldview has affected our faith, from making us sceptical of supernatural healing to being afraid to speak the truth of the Bible into a Christian friend’s life when they need to hear it because we mustn’t be ‘intolerant’. While for my African friends, their worldview may lead them to believe without measuring the truth of what they hear to blaming everything on the spirit world rather than acknowledging personal sin or nature’s input.

Of course, the question then is, how do we determine truth? Well we certainly have to come back to the Bible and test our thoughts and actions against it, but even as we do that, we are always going to be reading it through our worldview specs. I think those of us who work in a cross-cultural setting are in a privileged position to start seeing God’s Word from different perspectives, and hopefully to find our understanding of God deepened as a result. I am looking forward to more conversations with my colleagues so that we can come to understand each other and our differences better and so I can see ways of interpreting and applying the Bible that I just haven’t noticed before. May the Spirit of truth guide us into us all truth (John 16:13)!