Lose Your Height

A learned pleasure for me lately has been teaching Sunday school for a bunch of little kiddos at my church. At 6'1" I tower over these little guys. You would think that at my height I would have some type of intimidating authority, control and rule but instead the opposite seems to be true. My words seem relatively useless as I direct them to a loud, rambunctious, and often silly group of children. There seems to be this two and half foot gap of disconnect between me and them. But something amazing happens when I leave my lofty perch and get down on my knees, sit in their tiny chairs, play and draw with them. They begin to connect with me, their eyes light up and I am allowed the opportunity to enter their beautiful tiny and sometimes scary little world.

I woke to these thoughts this morning in Kiev, Ukraine as I reflected on how I have changed over the last few years. One valuable life lesson I've learned during this time, is to check my American ideology at the airport before leaving to another country. We cannot go, live life or influence others significantly if we think ourselves or our ideology better than others. When we do this we will naturally look down on others if they do not align with our way of thinking. When God said Go into all the world he did not want us to condemn but to serve others in truth and to represent grace and mercy. I believe God never asks us to do anything he hasn't done. So how has our God demonstrated these principles to us? In simplicity, He came from his heavenly thrown to come down to our earthly level. He then showed through his life to serve others by taking it even further. He humbled himself by going two and half feet further to kneel before us while he cleaned our dirty feet. Can we do that? It's not easy to humble ourselves and become vulnerable but when we begin to put this into practice, everything begins to change. Blinders come off our eyes and a precious and beautiful world opens before us. Verses likes "It's better to give than to receive" begin to actually make sense. Greed, gluttony and excess begin to rub you wrong and it naturally influences the way you live. You slowly begin to care less and less about what you personally can get out of life and how you can give more away. At the risk of sounding preachy, I often wonder how kind history will be on our super sized McMansion lifestyles. How can we live so blessed and ignore those in our world that barely survive and have so little hope of anything better? It is our responsibility, biblically speaking, to care for this earth and to bring good news to a hurting world. It's not someone else's problem it is ours. We are commanded to go, to give and to care for the least of these in our world. Let us not someday stand before our God making excuses for our mega flat screen tv's while our worlds children died because they went without our love and care. Lets begin to do today what we can, to give from our richness and blessings. Let us model our saviors example and get down on our knees and look up into those hurting and wounded eyes and wash some feet.