Missionaries are bold people. Not everyone is bold the same way. With boldness come opinions. I've no shortage of those myself. Wisdom, in my experience, is knowing when and how to restrain yourself from sharing your opinions.
For years, I spouted my opinions to everyone and anyone. I quickly got a reputation amongst my family as people would often say to me "ah... that's jsut Chad." I was a teenager after all, I knew everything.
I had a list of things that were required for a Christ centered Utopia. How the world SHOULD be run.. according to Chad. That list ran miles long and it began its construction in my early teens and was promptly burned the day after I got married (-;
Marriage and having children quickly make you realize how much you have to learn in life. You shift from thinking your parents knew nothing as a teenager to realizing jsut how much they did now. I started shutting up and started observing and God taught me a lot of things. I abandoned my list for Utopia and began learning God's list for my life.
Which is why, I am stunned to be living in the place I am now. There are many things here from that list written so many years ago and forgotten about.
Things like:
-a lack of focus on material wealth
-a lack of focus on fashion as a status symbol(this one was added because I personally have no sense of fashion)
but the one that has really reached me strongly is
-a caring community
Where we lived, you could find caring communities if you looked. It was often a rare find, and once you found one you stayed in it. We found one back home, and we stayed for as long as we dared until God called us here.
After living in such a wonderful place as we did, with so many wonderful and caring friends, I was prepared to make living in a land of total strangers a sacrifice of worship.
But God loves to bless us, and He loves irony. The people here bond together over a common purpose. The fun I've been mentioning is a side effect of this bond.
What prompted this entry is that last night we attended a performance that was a rehash of a tradition they do with the graduating high school class here.
As a form of recognition and a way to encourage and honor the 11th and 12th graders, they do a "carol sing" like production by renovating a building, and serving a banquet. They perform a play that incorporates a lot of inside jokes for the youth, and then the next day, they do the same thing for us and say "this is what we've done for the youth."
The play consisted of gentle reminders of Biblical character building concepts, moral points, and good old fashioned clean fun.
There were parts that reminded me of home. A lot of parts that reminded me of home. But what stayed present in my mind the longest is how wonderful God is.
Here are people who have come here to work on Bible translation and literacy, and they have these other talents, some acting, some painting, construction, writing, directing, sound, whatever it is, and they put them to such a use as to almost create what amounts to a celebration and rite of passage for these young men and women who are very soon going to go out into the world to find what God has for them.
I'm always amazed at the talents of people, and to see people use every talent they have for God is praise inspiring.
And then, after all of that, God says to me "remember how you felt a truly Christ centered society would be?.... remember your opinions about a loving community? I've given you one...again."
I love God's style... I jsut love it.
-Chad
p.s. I put a brief png tour movie together on the website that you can download.
http://www.gimpel.tv/newsletter
(look on the left sidebar for the PNG tour video)
Blessings!!!!
