cultural lens
Eye glasses. Image courtesy Tatiana Popova/shutterstock.com
We all wear a set of spectacles. Everyone does. These lenses dictate the way we view life. They determine the habits we make, what to eat, when to sleep, when to marry, and how to work. They assign value to our lives, determining what is meaningful: family, faith, honor, love.
If you are like me, you wear two pairs of spectacles — some people in the world wear three or more.
What I learned living cross-culturally as a Christian is that you can see Jesus wearing different spectacles. You do not have to abandon your pair, or switch it out for a new one, in order to find Jesus. You do not have to forsake the cultural values you were assigned at birth, taught by your parents, and passed down by your ancestors in order to know Jesus. You find Jesus by looking through them.
Joseph Kony, head of the Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army, in a rare public appearance, 2006. Photo by Adam Pletts/Getty Images.
“Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.”
So begins the Invisible Children’s KONY 2012 video that recently went viral. And yet, I would perhaps change this opening quote to say something like, “Nothing is more powerful than the stories by which we construct our identities,” because these stories determine who you believe you are and how you believe you can engage in the world and with others.
Powerful. Potentially dangerous. Always in some way failing in it’s accuracy and exclusive to someone else. Even with our best intentions.