It’s 6:30 AM here in Sri Lanka, with an impressive array of birds chirping and singing outside of the screenless windows of the AirBnB that has provided us the two-bedroom upstairs of a house in Colombo, complete with balcony, kitchen, shower, living room, and everything else that we could need for our first few days of the trip. Not bad for less than $40 a night.
Ceiling fans take the place of air conditioning, and thankfully it gets decently cool (upper 70s) after dark. One or two of the places we’ve been thus far has air conditioning, but it seems like that’s out of the norm. Even the airport didn’t have it.
Stepping off the plane into the Sri Lankan airport was stepping from one world into another – new scents, sights, tastes, and experiences. You can re
ad articles and blogs, see photos and videos, and hear stories of another country, but you don’t really know anything about it until you’ve been there and driven (or at least ridden) through it’s streets, eaten it’s food, sat down and talked with it’s people, and spent even a short few hours there. Even in the barely 24 hours that we’ve been here, I love this country for how different it is from mine.
It’s strange, thinking back on the mixed reactions people would have as Kelly or I told them that we were taking a trip to Sri Lanka and India. Probably the most common response was “Why would you want to go there?” asked in an incredulous tone that clearly implied that no one in their right mind would go to countries like Sri Lanka and India for vacation. Even the people who were excited for us to go seemed to keep assuming that we were going for some sort of “missions” trip – as if the primary reason for going could only be to do service or be a missionary of some sort.
We so often make judgments about cultures, countries, and even people based on what we’ve seen, read, or heard from afar. Thanks to social media and the internet we have access to tens of thousands of opinions and facts about different political parties, theological camps, cultural groups, and social classes. I know I read plenty of travel blogs and watched plenty of videos about Sri Lanka and India before we left. It all makes us feel like we know something about those people. We don’t.
Hold off on your judgment calls and opinions until you’ve experienced and known. Jesus made a habit of engaging with people that everyone else assumed they knew because of what they’d heard or seen from afar. The Samaratins. The woman at the well. The woman caught in adultry. The children that his disciples tried to keep from bothering him. He invited all of them in, talked with them, engaged and experienced the world from their perspective. Even though he had the absolute right to pronounce just judgment from heaven, he stepped out into the opposition’s camp, walked the streets, sat down at the campfire, shared meals, and slept in the same houses and on the same ground as them.
The world’s opinion of Christians would change drastically if we lived like that rather than tossing out our judgments and opinions in conversation and social media. Our lives would change if we lived like that, and my guess is that we’d get to have some amazing learning experiences and a whole lot of fun. I know I have so far.
It’s now almost 7AM. The temperature is rising and the birds aren’t anywhere close to finished singing. Let’s see what this day brings!
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Woo!