7 year old baseball wisdom

My daughter teaches me how to not get (overly) sucked in to our cultural myths.

My daughter and I are Cardinals fans. She started going out to the car with me in the morning in Ghana to listen last year (2005) if the Cardinals had beaten the Astros in the National League Championship. We would hear about a two sentence summary of the game. They finally lost that series. In the process I created a little baseball fan and bonded with my daughter. We went to two games in 2006 and watched the Cardinals go deep into the post season.

During the world series a couple days ago, she had gone to bed before the game was over. In the morning we went online to watch some of the big plays of the Cardinals win the night before. We watched for several minutes and I continued clicking around after we had exhausted the highlights and she looked at me and said, "Dad, you can read about it all day and all night but it is not going to make a difference."

Well said. Wisdom. Enough is enough.

Sports is certainly part of cultural metaphor. Walter Wink and then Paul Hiebert have claimed our fascination with sports in part is a replaying of Indo-European 'myth' or paradigm for our world view. Life is based on competition and battle. I wonder how often our big stories out of our Indo-European cultural heritage unknowingly enter into our mission. Our mission (also our church life, politics etc.) can take on story lines and themes from the cultural governing story (read myth) rather than that of the biblical story. See Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination (Fortress, 1992). Paul Hiebert, Anthropological Reflections on Missiological Issues (Baker, 1994).

Created to be dependent - blessings discovered on a short term trip "overseas"

I heard a lady at a mission meeting say that after being in Haiti for one week she got on the plane to come home and it felt like she was leaving the real world to go back home to our pretend world. Why is it that short term trips or being in another culture open us up like this? I certainly had this experience on two short term overseas trips in my youth.

Martin Luther in his introduction to the Lord's Prayer from the Large Catechism puts his finger on our problem of indepedence. "For we all have enough that we lack, but the great problem is that we do not see it or feel it. God wishes you to lament and express your needs and wants, not because he is unaware, but to kindle your heart to stronger and greater desires and to spread your cloak wide to receive many things" (paragraph 27).

We are created to be dependent on God to open our arms up wide to receive from him. In this culture, we are very independent and insulated planning and striving to be set for the future. We know what to expect. By going overseas to another culture or to a foreign culture inside our own country(and staying there), we can no longer depend on ourselves. We can't easily escape to our idols of familiar self support.

I wonder if that is partly why being immersed in a non-Western culture opens us up to God. We finally realize we are created to be dependent and (at least for a time) we realize that is real and less artificial than the typical independent Western 'ideal' life. The challenge for me is that after some time overseas we set up the old independent supports, relying on ourselves, perceiving ourselves as big fish and capable swimmers in foreign ponds. All of which is very dangerous - I need to continue to open up my cloak wide to receive many things from God through his other creatures and creation.

In a play without a script

What is it like to live in another culture 24 hours a day 7 days a week? Well here is my analogy. Imagine you have a major role in a play. You come to what you think is the first practice but for some reason you have never got a script sent to you in the mail so you figure you'll pick one up when you arrive. As you get there, you discover that this is no rehearsal, this is the first performance and you are supposed to have your script memorized. But you never got a script. It's too late now. You are ushered out on stage.

Imagine yourself in the play, with other actors and actresses. All of them have their lines and have speaking parts. You know you must too, only you don't know when they come or what they are. You watch the other characters around you and you imagine what your character might say. Once in a while you say something and then look at the other characters for a response. Did you do it right? No response. You don't know. So you negotiate and in time you find yourself showing up in familiar scenes. Scenes that keep repeating themselves. Do you do the same thing as you did last time or do you adapt and change it up?

Sometimes you get clear negative messages from people that what you are doing is not good so in those cases you change it up. But ironically sometimes its the times you think you are at your best that you get those comments.

The funny thing is that the play just keeps going on. You can hardly get off stage. At times you duck aside and talk to your family members who lo and behold have parts in the play too. But then you find other actors/actresses are still watching. Sometimes its seems the audience finds out what you said off stage - how did they know that?

Eventually, things get more familiar and the play is recognizable as life, but I'll tell you what - after every day you become grateful that God invented sleep! I have never rested better than I do in Africa!