This was written as a monthly reflection to be posted in the ELCA-MUD Blog which includes updates from the other YAGM volunteer and our coordinators Brian & Kristen Konkol. It can be viewed at www.elcamud.blogspot.com.
Earlier this month I had the privilege of leading the regular meeting of the Youth League at St. Luke Lutheran Church in the Roodepan Township of Kimberley. Life had been very busy in the days leading up to this particular evening and my talk was slowly coming together. I was pretty clueless when I first began outlining it as to what I should speak about. How would I, as an American that had just stepped into this place, relate to a group of mostly high school aged youth that I had met on one occasion prior to this night? And then as I was processing all that I’ve been experiencing in the 6 weeks here in South Africa before this particular day, I realized that in some ways, I had been reliving that same time period in my life. Those were the days of first impressions and trying to make friends that would last a lifetime. What image would you portray to someone you had just met? What view did you have of them and what formed those opinions? Funny, that my life has been an intense, non-stop series of first impression-making situations since arriving in South Africa and even more so since I settled here in Roodepan.
In thinking about the first-impressions I have been making, I can’t help but recall a wonderful conversation I was blessed to have with a fellow MUD3 volunteer in Pietermaritzburg after an ELCSA Young Adult League conference. We spent part of an evening discussing our personalities; the things that make each of us tick, what makes us who we are as individuals. We talked pretty openly about the traits that sometimes we wish we could shake because of the reputations that they have given us (both positively and negatively). Then came the big realization: even with a chance to be someone completely new coming into a situation like this where no one knows who we have been, we both found ourselves revealing the same core identity, these same traits, being viewed in the same ways by entirely new people. What was it about these core characteristics that we still couldn’t leave behind, even in coming to another hemisphere of the world?
While pondering these two ideas of first impressions and core identity, I found myself remembering the story of the creation of mankind, found in the first chapter of Genesis. There, as I had read so many times before, were the words “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness…” and “So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them...” And suddenly, I found myself on this quest to define God’s “image” and “likeness”. What does it mean and how does it relate to my life where I am today? While we can dwell on the characteristics of an all-powerful, all-knowing God who is a Wonderful Counselor, the Prince of Peace, etc, etc how does that translate to a mere human, who by nature is imperfect and will never hold all the power? I found myself reading some of those passages of the Bible that were written with the very intention of teaching us to live our lives in a way where we are striving to be a true image of God. We were created in the image of God, a reflection of those characteristics on earth, but not actually to be just like him.
The night of my discussion with the Youth, I gave them a long list of verses to look up and read out loud to the group (quite the challenge when I’m giving a book of the Bible in English and they have never heard of it because the books apparently translate differently in Afrikaans – we managed to navigate through with some mutual learning along the way.) In the end though, we could sum up all of what we were reading in Jesus’ answer to one of the Pharisees’ questions about which of the commandments was the greatest of them all. It is here in the Gospel of Matthew (22:34-40) that 10 commandments become just 2 – “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind” and “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Still the question remained for me: How does this fit in with that core identity I can’t seem to escape?
These days I seem to find myself standing out in all sorts of ways. In all likelihood, I am the ONLY white person living in the Roodepan Township (which is a predominantly coloured community – during the apartheid era this was the term used for those who didn’t fit in the White, Black, or Indian categories because they were actually “mixed-race”.) I frequently find myself being watched as I walk the streets to my work sites each day, catch a taxi, or even ride in a vehicle through the community with a friend or host family member. But on the flip-side, the whites in town can’t seem to figure me out either. As I wander the mall with coloured friends of mine, carrying their 18-month old beautiful boy, it is easy to see the questions on their faces trying to figure out if he is light-skinned enough to be my child or what in the world I might actually be doing hanging out with “them”. Even if people are not hung up on the color of my skin and just speak to me, the moment I respond, either to say “sorry, I don’t speak Afrikaans, yet” or to actually carry the conversation they are then stopped in their tracks by my accent (even if they can’t place it as American initially.) It has not been easy trying to fit into the boxes that my “neighbors” have for me. But how often have I been guilty of this in some way too?
My definition of “neighbor” has been challenged most of my life, but in the last couple of months it has taken on a whole new meaning. While in my mind, my neighbor has always included the people of Africa, South Africa, Kimberley, Roodepan (and the rest of the world)– I have only now been able to begin to put faces with that concept and I find myself taking to heart those words of Jesus a little bit more. I have had the privilege of traversing part of this beautiful country by bus three times now between Pietermaritzburg and Bloemfontein and I’m reminded of a line from one of the many movies that have been shown for entertainment during those trips. The characters were having a conversation about race issues amongst their youth baseball team. The coach asked the team what race one of the players was and the boys responded based on the color of his skin. The coach told them they were wrong and went on to say that “his race is human because there is only one human race.” What an important reminder for us as we try to determine who our “neighbors” really are. We are one human race and our neighbors are our brothers and sisters that make up that one human race. We don’t get to decide who fits in that box, everyone is in, and everyone needs to be loved in the way that we love ourselves.
Coming back to these ideas of first impressions and core identity, I see that so often we can only create a first impression by what is obvious and usually based on what is on the outside. We rarely give one another more than a few seconds, before making a judgment about what that person’s core identity surely must be, based on things like the color of their skin or the accent with which they speak or the way they dress or how their hair is done (or un-done), etc. In this journey to understand those traits of my core identity that keep coming back, I find that they are the characteristics I was given when I was made in the image of God and are much deeper than just the outside surface of my person. I can only hope that my attempts to embody this image by loving my “neighbor”, translates into an authentic picture of myself. I hope that I’m not just carrying that notion in my head and in my heart but that it is also so very apparent through the smile on my face and in the way I greet a new person in the street. I want my core identity, that part of me that I can’t seem to shake even when I have a chance to reinvent myself, to continue to be a beautiful reflection of the image of God and I want it to be obvious to those around me. I hope that so far I have been the most authentic “version” of myself to the people that I have met in South Africa, but more so I hope that I can lose the other “versions” and just be the person I was created to be, without fear of what my neighbors might think. I hope, too, that I am learning to see that all of my neighbors were also made in the image of God and that their unique characteristics are what make them a beautiful part of the family of Christ. I think that I have definitely been placed in a community that will challenge me to this task day in and day out for the next 10 months and I am grateful for that. I pray that this is a contagious idea, worldwide – you don’t have to be in South Africa to challenge your notions of who your neighbors are or what the image of God looks like in you. I hope that all of us will truly seek to live out our lives as our authentic selves, made in the image of God. After all, first impressions can be hard to break.
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