Connecting and Disconnecting Through Media
I was just walking through the Bangkok international airport terminal and thinking about the people going by around me, and the various conversations I have been having with people, and the article I was just reading on the plane.
I’m on my way back from Manila in the Philippines. I was meeting with two other missionaries who head up Asia Pacific Media Ministries. We were meeting about a couple of different projects we are working together on, but primarily about some work we are doing for the World Missions Summit. This is an event that will be held over new years, and is designed to expose college students to missions and the short term missions opportunities around the world. So my conversation with these missionaries drifted toward what we could do with a two or three month short term worker.
Working with media, there is often a significant learning curve associated with our production work, so a one or two year worker could be pretty useful, but what about a one or two MONTH person? I brought up the need to always be looking toward emerging media. There is always something new on the horizon, and it’s difficult to keep up with all the new technology. Today, the big emerging media is web related. Blogs and podcasts are the hot thing today, tomorrow who knows. But chances are that college age kids will be the ones who know about the newest thing, so why not use them in it? For instance, why not use them in developing blogs and podcasts and other web related media in order to keep in touch, and help educate our supporters about what is happening in our ministry here.
So then on the plane I picked up the latest Newsweek and read an article on the growing disparity between the rich and the poor in Asia. It definitely mentioned the growth in the major Asian economies, but it also mentioned the more rapid growth of the poor class who live on $1 to $2 per day. This is something we clearly see in Cambodia, and all the other countries around us. With that being true, we need to reach out to both ends of the economic spectrum. So while we have to look for the next emerging media opportunity that will speak to the emerging well-to-do, we still need to look at what types of media we can use to reach out to those who continue to struggle to find a way to live day to day.
So now we come to the airport. I’m walking down the terminal concourse past various shops, listening to Christmas music on my iPod, and I start noticing the people walking around me. Our new web-site tries to incorporate many of the emerging media opportunities I have mentioned, all in an effort to be more connected with people around the world. But yet, at the same time, especially when I am traveling, I tend to use these types of emerging media to keep people who are five feet away at a “safe and comfortable” distance. If I am listening to my iPod, or surfing the web, or whatever, I don’t have to talk to the person in the plane seat next to me, or the traveler who looks confused in the airport concourse, or whatever. New technology and new opportunities for using emerging media and all of that can be good, and they can be bad. Like everything else, it comes down to balance. There aren’t easy answers in any of these issues. You can’t make a blanket statement about rich vs. poor situations or high tech vs. low tech, and expect it to be true across the board. Each case has to be worked through individually. That’s where we live here on the missions field. As I think about various things I have written about on this blog over the last few months, I realize that I raise various questions, but don’t give many answers. In some ways I wish I could give simple answers. That’s what pastors and missionaries and “professional” Christians are supposed to do, right? But the reason I started this blog was to try to give an honest picture of what missionary life is like, and a missionary’s life is a lot like your life; struggling to live each day in the place you find yourself in such a way that God’s grace can be seen in you.
The Head, The Heart, and The Great Divide
It seems to me that there is a stubborn disconnect between our heart and our head.
I spent this morning walking through one of the many slum areas in Bangkok, Thailand with another missionary who has been working there for many years. Bangkok is a lot like many cities throughout the world, especially in second and third world countries, in that it has an incredible disparity between the poor and the rich. People live in shacks next to what amounts to open sewers in the shadow of five star high-rise hotels and condos.
How do we deal with that? If you listen to popular news outlets, or the promotional material produced by many relief agencies, it would seem the answer is in giving money to help them out of their situation. Think of what you hear; “The government needs to reduce military spending and give more for relief work,” or “Buy a ticket to Live Aid, or whatever the latest concert is that is raising money for relief work.” And we want to help, so why not? If we happen to visit one of these countries and pass a beggar, why not give them some money to help them? Why not build them houses? Isn’t it right to have compassion and want to reach out and touch the hurting in the name of Jesus?
Compassion is, in many cases, the easy part. Finding compassionate and constructive solutions is the hard part. I believe that Jesus wants us to be about changing the lives of those around us, not just in a spiritual way, but in every way, including physical ways that affect their daily lives. But if we let our heart disconnect from our head and just starting handing out relief funds, we end up making many problems worse. In those cases, money given to one family not only builds dependency into their way of thinking, but it builds animosity with others in the community because you didn’t help them. And if the underlying problems that caused the family’s financial difficulties in the first place aren’t addressed (like alcoholism, gambling, etc.), then within a short amount of time they end up right back in the same place they were when you started to try to help them. Or many times the church just tries to remove the person from the slum and never addresses the problems that create and perpetuate the slum in the first place.
This is the part where you might expect me to lay out my three point plan to lift these people out of slum life. Unfortunately I don’t have any plan like that. The truth is these kinds of problems don’t have easy answers and are almost never solved by some cookie-cutter program. It’s not a three step process; it’s more like three hundred steps, walked together day by day over many years. It’s walking together with hurting people while working out your salvation with fear and trembling. But that rubs us the wrong way. We want an easy answer. We want to immediately scratch that compassion itch and sooth our conscience with the idea that we gave our five dollars to the beggar we passed, so we have done our part. Our heart wants to disconnect from our head and run the show.
After living long enough in the third world, I tend to have the opposite problem; my head wants to run the show with no thought to the issues of the heart. I’ve mentioned this before, but the fact is that I tend to become callous to the needs of those around me. I know that every reputable relief agency working in Cambodia agrees that giving money to beggars is a bad idea all around (I won’t go into all the details of why right now, but trust me on this), so I end up using that as a reason to ignore them. Not only do I not give them hand-outs, but I just stop thinking about them all together. And if that in itself isn’t bad enough, that indifference ends up spilling over into other things as well. My head doesn’t want anything to do with my heart. Well that’s not right either.
Even in the area of basic faith and Christian living we are plagued by this disconnect between heart and head. I may “know” a particular doctrine to be true for years, but then one day some event happens, or I find myself in some situation that leaves me crying out to God, and suddenly that thing I “knew” takes on a whole new level of meaning and my heart embraces it in a way that was missing before. And all of this has become so common place that I never even realized that something had been missing. On the other hand, sometimes it’s acting on some impulse or feeling, despite some head knowledge that tells us to do the opposite thing. This disconnect reaches into every area to trip us up.
So now is it time for my three-steps to better balance? No, I still don’t have that. But I do think I can boil it down to one idea. Living life with Jesus can’t be reduced to 7 steps for successful Christian living; living with Jesus is like any other relationship. It is always changing and growing. This year Lisa and I celebrated our 15th anniversary, and I still don’t have it all figured out. On Sunday, Alex turns 8 years old, and Dmetri is less than 6 months from his 10th birthday, and I understand even less about parenting. Does that mean I don’t have a clue how to act with my wife and kids? No, of course not, but my relationship with each one of them continues to change every day, and to make it all work I have to use both my head and my heart. So why should my relationship with God be any different? I’ve been a Christian for more years than I care to try to figure out, but I don’t have all the details of that relationship worked out any better than I do with my wife or kids. But I do know that to make it work I need to use both my head and my heart. And living in that balance isn’t easy.
Is there a point to this rambling? Well, just that these are the issues we are facing today. Do we want to change people’s lives for the better? Yes. Do we want to introduce people to the life changing power of Jesus Christ? Yes. Are we working to do that? Yes, but the way we do that is different in every situation. What worked one place will fail miserably somewhere else. That’s why we need both our heart and our head. God created us with both for a reason.
