From Openness to 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.