Singing the Same Song in Different Languages

Last month we went to Disney World — a perpetual feast for the senses. But. For someone like me who needs to get alone for a little daily contemplation, it can be a bit overwhelming. Except for one saving grace: It's a Small World.

I was 17, I think — and much less self-aware, I know — when I first climbed aboard the jolting, jostling little boat that would carry me to "distant shores" through the rooms filled with dolls all singing the same song. There were different languages and different clothing styles. The customs represented varied as greatly as the terrain upon which they were stationed. Some sang among mountain peaks, others on desert plains. Some bundled in parkas and earmuffs, others in grass skirts and leis.

And I don't know what it was — the change in pace from the exhilarating roller-coaster-kind-of-rides or the welcome blast of air conditioning — but there was something stilling about watching all these representatives of different peoples mouthing words to the same tune. There was a deeper message in it for that ponytailed teenager. Depths that it would take me years to plumb.

A small, small world. Indeed.

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Days after Maya Angelou's passing, I posted a few of her beautiful words on Facebook:

"If you must look back, do so forgivingly. If you must look forward, do so prayerfully. However, the wisest thing you can do is to be present in the present ... gratefully."

Pretty amazing words, right? What could possibly be the offense in them? Within minutes a comment popped up, the gist of which was to deny the beauty and wisdom of the words for the sake of Angelou's apparently deviant beliefs about abortion (specifically, deviant according to this commenter).

It took me a few moments. I breathed. I cleaned. I tied my toddler's shoes. I ate. (Chocolate, if you must know. And yes, lots of it.)

But then I came back to the computer. And with my fingers resting lightly on familiar keys, I listened to the song in my heart, the language that sings beyond words. Then I typed what I hope was a gentle response: "I'm not really familiar with her views on abortion. But I do know that she what she gave the world was certainly more than just that. And I can celebrate those things."

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Truth comes to us in surprising forms.

Sometimes through a calming ride at Disney World. Sometimes through someone who may have differing opinions from our own on matters that we hold dear. Often, we turn a deaf ear to God not because we don't want to hear truth, but because we don't like the package in which it comes. We want God to use sanctioned means for speaking to us. Many times, if we're brutally honest, we want God to come to us looking like us. And so we construct a system of worthiness criteria by which we measure others. We forget that God puts eternity's song inside the ones bundled in parkas just as much as the ones in grass skirts. We deny that God could give wisdom to one with this color skin or that many tattoos or who holds a picket sign with those words on it.

The sadness of it is that, so often, we are all singing the same song. In different languages.

Perhaps there are times to discern differences between people. But aren't there also times that we can say with H.G. Wells, "Our true nationality is mankind" and not be afraid of the consequences of such solidarity? We are part and parcel with the broken and the faulty and even the ones who are belligerently wrong. For the person who dismisses Michael Gungor and the person who dismisses Mark Driscoll are one and the same. Each is missing out on the face of God as seen through these unique image-bearers. Each is limiting the Divine by preference for the package in which God comes. Each is forcing Spirit through the rigors of the either-or instead of opening wide to the both-and. Because we are all human. We are wrong and we are right. We all get hungry and thirsty with marked regularity and we all sweat in the hot Florida sun. We surprise ourselves with tears at the darndest times and hardly a one of us doesn't know what it is to surge with anger's energy. In short, the things that hold us together in commonality are many more than the things that would divide us.

The characteristic mark of Christ's followers is not a squinting, exacting sort of judgmentalism, but a generous, wide embrace of the myriad ways God speaks. Through a donkey or a pagan pharaoh, through a sheep-herder-turned-prophet, a poet-king, or a conversation in an Athenian civil court, rife with altars. If the Bible is clear on anything, it might be this: God seems to possess a startling proclivity for speaking to us in the language we least expect.

Sometimes these new ways of hearing God are merely signposts. They direct us away from the narrowness which has us backed into a corner and they dare us to open. To listen. To feel. To come back into the wild and beautiful place that is our true Home. They point the direction that, if our souls would be saved (again and repeatedly), we must go. And the glory of it is that when we begin to take the medicine — to breathe that newer, stronger life into an anemic faith — we find ourselves less likely to throw rocks at those who are struggling with their own asphyxiations.

Here we learn compassion.

Because "they" are me. And I am them. We all see in part. But are all known. Fully.

Yes. Yes, it is a small world, after all.

Kelli Woodford lives in the Midwest, surrounded by cornfields and love, with her husband and seven blue-eyed children. There isn’t much she loves more than engaging conversations and crackling firesides. Especially combining the two. Kelli writes with some regularity at her personal blog and is a respected contributor for several online magazines, as well. Two published books also bear her stories, Mom in the Mirror and Not Afraid (a Civitas Press community project, edited by Alise Wright).