Carry the weight of your brother
Carry the weight of your sister
I’m not afraid to say I don’t know
Carry the weight of your father
Carry the weight of your mother
I’m not afraid to say I don’t know anymore
Carry the weight of your neighbor
Carry the weight of a stranger
I’m not afraid to say I don’t know what to do
And so I carry the weight
Carry the weight
Carry the weight
Carry the weight
Carry the weight of each other
Carry the weight of another
I’m not afraid to say I don’t know
When I hear this song by Denison Witmer, I think of our
calling as believers to help shoulder the burdens of the people around us. As
Americans, in a society that tells us we are each the individual center of the
universe, we are often tempted to subscribe to the philosophy of “if it doesn’t
directly affect me and my life I can ignore it,” but this is not biblical. We
are actually called and commanded to care about the problems of others as if
they were our own. We are called to not simply walk by an injustice or turn a
blind eye to it because it does not make our daily lives harder. As believers
we are called to “do justice, love kindness,” and “carry each other’s burdens.”
On the World Race we are faced with the world’s gross
injustices and inequalities in a more direct way than most people at home are.
It’s even harder for us to ignore the fact that people around the world are
suffering, but if we wanted to we could still decide not to care, because at
the end of the eleven months we will get to go home to our nice houses, cars,
and lives. We could easily take a Bandaid mentality to the pain we see around
us, doing or saying something to ease the immediate suffering without
emotionally investing in the problem enough to truly let it affect us. In fact,
sometimes that’s exactly what we do. But it’s not what we are called to do. We
are called to care about other people’s pain as if it were our own. The other
day I got to see what it feels like to not only hear about a hurt in someone’s
life and listen to his story, but to actually feel his pain and take on the
burden as my own.
Here in Tanzania we were doing door-to-door ministry and
street evangelism with the local Pentecostal church that we are working with
this month. Rachael, Erin, and I set out with our translator Nathaniel to walk
the streets of Mailimoja and tell people about God. Not long into our day we
stopped at a little car repair shop on the side of the road where a group of
men was hanging out. They invited us to sit down and talk with them, so we started
by asking them what they knew about God. To our surprise, they explained that
they worship their ancestors, go out into the forest and pray to the trees, and
believe in reincarnation. We were expecting them to say they were Muslims, so
this was a curveball that we didn’t know how to respond to. We asked them to
tell us more about their beliefs, and they shared with us the stories of their
ancient traditions. Eventually, I asked the one doing all the talking a few
questions to clarify whether or not he thought God existed at all. This was his
response:
“This is what you need to
understand-we are very different. We are black, you are white. We come from Africa,
and you come from Europe or America. We believe different things because of our
traditions. The continent of Africa is very old, and our beliefs are very
ancient. We have been believing these same things since long before the Bible
ever existed. We have been praying to our ancestors and worshipping nature for
thousands of years, and everything was fine. If our crops needed rain we would
pray to the gods in the forest and it would rain. They met our needs. Then one
day the Arab people showed up with their Koran and told us that we had to
believe what it said. Not long after that the white people came with their
Bible and they told us that we were wrong unless we believed what it said. But
all these Muslims and Christians sit in their churches week after week asking
their gods for things that don’t happen, while we go out into the forest, pray
for rain, and receive it. They think that just because they are different from
us they can come and tell us what to believe, but we don’t need their beliefs
or their gods.”
As he was speaking I felt a very heavy weight on me. I felt
like I was living inside of my own nightmare in a way, because this was the
exact kind of situation I had read about and thought of how I would respond if
faced with the same challenge. I spent the last few years studying anthropology
and taking classes on cross-cultural ministry. In such classes we studied the
injustices of the cultural imperialism that the colonial era had brought to
places like East Africa. We learned about the arrogant approach of the
colonizers in assuming that the local people would accept their governments and
their religions simply because they were white and had guns. As I read about it
in a book it made me sad and angry on their behalf, but now that I was face to face
with someone who was rejecting God because of the arrogant white package he
came in, it became my problem too.
As I turned to answer him, something came over me and I
almost couldn’t speak. I began to cry, which if you know me you know is very
rare. Through my tears I explained to him that he was right. He and his people
should not be expected to believe in a new God simply because a white person
came and told them to. I told him that even though neither he nor I was alive
when the white people first came and forced their ways on the Africans, I
wanted to apologize to him and his ancestors on behalf of me and my ancestors.
The crowd of men around me was completely silent as I tearfully explained that
regardless of our color, background, or ethnicity, we are all created in God’s
image, and he loves us all the same. I told him that what the colonizers did
was wrong, and that we were not here to debate with them, tell them they are
wrong, or convince them to accept our beliefs. We were simply here as messengers
because we have been commanded to go into all the world and spread the news of
Jesus. I told him that God is so big that he fits inside of all cultures and is
simultaneously bigger than all cultures. Because of our cultural heritage, we
see God revealed to us in a book, but maybe they see God’s greatness in nature.
Either way, we are all supposed to be pointed to the God who made it all and
loves us all. In heaven we will all still be different, but we will be at peace
with each other, free to worship the same God together.
As I spoke, their demeanors changed from combative to
receptive. No one made any drastic decisions or obvious changes of belief that
day, but I saw a change of heart on their faces. The next day we met with one
of their wives to help talk her through some marriage problems she was having.
In the course of the conversation she told us that her husband, who had
previous prevented her from going to church because he hated the hypocrisy of
Christians, told her to meet with us because he felt like we were different. He
told her that the day before we had told him about our God and that one of us
had even cried as we explained that God loves everyone the same. This had
enough of an impact on him that he asked us to talk to his wife, and we got to
pray for her and help her work through a lot of her resentment towards him for
leading her away from her faith.
When it was all over, I realized that God had given me a
burden for cultural injustice that was heavy enough that I had reacted very
strongly when faced with someone who was choosing to reject God because of the
actions of people. This was not technically my problem to solve. Colonialism
happened hundreds of years ago by people I never knew, and I haven’t even been
directly involved in the continuing cultural imperialism that still exists in
much of foreign missions today. But I had to do something. I had to stand in
the gap for all the years of insulting hurt that the people here have endured
because of the thoughtlessness of my ancestors. I had to do more than say
something placating and neglect to personally care or emotionally invest in
their pain. And I saw that when we actually follow the command to bear one
another’s burdens, people respond and their hearts change. I’m not telling this
story to commend myself. I’m telling it to illustrate what happens when we
choose to care on someone else’s behalf about a problem that doesn’t directly
involve us. I’m telling it to show what could probably happen far more often if
we didn’t overlook the struggles of the people around us and on the other side
of the world simply because they are not our own. Imagine the injustices we could abolish and
the work we could do for the Kingdom if we took the burdens of people we have
no responsibility for and shouldered them as our own, working together in love
to set wrongs right.
Carry the weight of each other.
