From Openness to Trust

[Emma Hodges]

One of the four skills listed below that I can start cultivating in my life today is tolerance for ambiguity. It will be good for me to learn to be okay with uncertainty as I head into a new culture where many things will be uncertain. I can continue to grow in this skill by putting myself in situations where I am not certain of the outcome and am not completely comfortable. These are the situations where I believe people experience the most growth.

I learned a number of things from watching the video lectures, but here are three major things I picked up. Firstly, missionaries can easily find themselves coming in and making quick judgments about a person or about a group of people based on pre-disposed thoughts or ideas. It is important to not let those quick judgments make a decision and instead come in with openness to learn and understand someone better. Secondly, I liked how he pointed out a number of stories from the Bible where Jesus practiced openness (for example, the woman at the well). This encouraged me to look deeper into how Jesus navigated situations like this in his own context. Thirdly, I liked how Elmer said “Trust has to be defined in the context of the other person”. You cannot just come in with your own ideas of what trust does or should look like, but instead you have to openly communicate with someone on what their ideas of trust are in order to build trust.

[Taliya]

Cultivating positive attribution and suspending judgement are two skills I can be practicing now to grow in openness. I often judge people quickly based on what category I put them in, so suspending judgement and accepting others as humans made in God’s image has been a little difficult for me but I really want to grow in this area because I see how negatively that can affect ministry. I don’t want to close doors on possible discipleship opportunities just because I made a judgement on someone and wasn’t open to really accept them for who God made them to be. I need to cultivate more of an attitude of positive attribution because I often misinterpret what others say or how they act towards me and get my feelings hurt. I’m interpreting this based on my cultural understandings, but if I took a moment to pause, and realized based on their cultural perspectives that they may not have intended to hurt me with what they did or said, it would prevent resentment in my own heart.

While I was watching the video lectures, these concepts stood out to me: 1. our categories of people dehumanize them. 2. People in North America assume they are servants but in other cultures, those actions don’t translate in the same way and they are still seen as arrogant. 3. Trust needs to be defined by the other person in the relationship where there are cultural differences, otherwise trust building to our understanding won’t actually be building trust.