Media Missionary Focus

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.

posted by Troy In Cambodia @ 4:11 PM