Inadvertent Offense

I was thinking this morning about the fact that I've removed a lot of the filters between my brain and my mouth over the last while. And that I think this gets me in trouble at times. I manage to inadvertently offend people because I am blunt.

I was talking with a friend last night about a mutual friend who I'm having a very hard time relating to at the moment. I think it's because this mutual friend is very "boxy" - things in her world are very well contained.

I don't do contained all that well - I've spent too long waiting for the kind of freedom I'm experiencing right now.

And I'll say things that other people might be thinking, but that I've never heard anyone admit to out loud. Things like (this is what I said last night), "I don't really care all that much about Islam." Now here's the thing. This is a loaded statement. I'm not saying I don't care about Muslims, or that I don't believe that people should be researching ways to reach Muslims with Christ, or anything along those lines. I'm simply saying that topics like "Islam and Terrorism" or "Radical Islam" aren't all that interesting to me. I'd rather focus on the many things we have in common with an Islamic believer. I'd rather hang out with someone who is a Muslim, and find out what they believe and why. I'd rather cultivate friendship than focus on how Islam is threatening Christianity, or how Muslims are persecuting Christians. Yes, these things are happening, and they are important, but they are not particularly where my passion lies.

See, it works like this for me. I'm very relational. My heart, the mission God has called me to is in North America, and specifically to the broken within the church corporate. So, I don't really care about the nation of Liberia, but I really do care about my friend who leaves next week to work for Samaritan's Purse doing relief work in Liberia and East Africa. Because I care about her, I care about Liberia. I don't really care about the nation of Ghana, but I care about the many friends and ministry partners of my family in that nation, and because I care about them, I care about Ghana. The same is true for any number of other locations around the world.

My next major overseas trip may be a mission trip, but at this point it seems far more likely that it will be a pilgrimage. There are places that have unique spiritual significance to me in Europe in particular -places that I have studied, where the things I learned spoke into deep places in my soul, marked stages in my journey, and I simply want to see and hang out in those places. A friend invited me on the weekend to come visit her in India. I'd love to see India - I've been warned to not make that my "first" mission trip - too overwhelming, too much heat, too many smells, too much poverty. But I've been fascinated by India ever since taking a class in Indian history. But again, I don't really want to go as a "missionary." I just want to go and hang out with some people I know, see some of the things I've studied, experience the culture a bit, pray and meet God. I think I could travel for the rest of my life (with long stops at home in between) as a pilgrim... simply wandering to places and meeting God there - with no particular agenda but His.