Please don't refresh this page.
We are submitting all your information.
This takes few seconds.
It will redirect after submission.
We are submitting all your information.
This takes few seconds.
It will redirect after submission.
I didn’t want her to be right.
Her words still hang like cobwebs around me. We couldn’t have lived in Africa for more than two months when my friend reflected, “The longer I’m here, the harder it is to know I’m helping and not hurting.”
The more she understood Ugandan culture, her awareness of cultural nuances and poverty’s complexity ballooned.
In my time there, I would only discover more about how right she was. What should have been easy in my mind–helping people–felt booby-trapped.
This wasn’t an excuse to back away in fear or throw up my hands. But it felt imperative to enlist close Ugandan friends to interpret all I couldn’t see so I could be wise in helping people. I wanted to live by the Hippocratic oath, “First, do no harm,” and needed guidance.
Old Testament scholar Gerhard von Rad observed that wisdom is an awareness of complex reality. This statement was a lightbulb moment for me. My husband described something similar: discernment is like looking at a black-and-white newspaper photo up-close. What formerly looks merely black and white then morphs into an extensive variety of monochrome pixels. To sort them requires a magnifying glass, a good eye, and a lot of patience.
Wisdom involves accurately weighing each portion of a situation. I’m intrigued by the Lord’s words in Leviticus 19:35 (ESV), “You shall do no wrong in judgment…in measures of length or weight or quantity.” If it’s critical to weigh physical items accurately, how much more the intangible?
Clearly, God hasn’t given us a spirit of fear as we make disciples (2 Timothy 1:7). In order to act wisely, I must have sober judgment of what I didn’t know (Romans 12:3), an increase of my own poverty of spirit (Matthew 5:3), and need for God and a multitude of counselors (Proverbs 11:14).
That kind of wisdom multiplies disciples because it leads us to act with thoughtful, truly helpful love. A love that takes the time to see people in front of us—their past, their present, their future.
Doing our homework in order to love well? Laborious—yes. Fraught with error—unquestionably. Worth it? For generations.
What’s one area of ministry that turned out to be far more complex than you thought?
Helping people out of cycles of poverty–rather than giving a handout–and when to do each continues to at times baffle me. I have to see past my own feelings of guilt, anger, and powerlessness and past the person’s own desires.