UPG - Update

Hey friends,
Sorry I haven't gotten a chance to update this in a while. Hopefully I'll get a chance to write a real update tomorrow, but I have to write a paper tonight. For now, I thought I'd share with you a paper I wrote on my Unreached People Groups experience. We have these things called "Reflection Papers" which are assigned after different LTEs and teachings we have. They're not graded, but they're required, and they just want us to take time to think about what we're learning, and write it down. So here's mine . . . if you have any questions about things, just let me know. Love you all!

Actions Speak Louder than Words
---->Although it was only a day and a half long, the Unreached People Groups LTE was one of my favorite LTE’s. It taught me so much about the importance of loving unconditionally and persevering in sharing your faith. My group represented the Kotokoli tribe of West Africa, a Muslim people group known for trading and stealing. Honestly, we didn’t study them nearly as much as we should have, nor did we do a very good job of coming up with our language, learning our culture and developing the roles we would each play. But even though I went into it unprepared and uncertain about how it would turn out, I still came out loving the experience.
One of the main things I learned was how necessary it is to share your faith gently, without devaluing other people's beliefs. I know it’s very hard to do, since sharing the Gospel involves telling people that there is only one way to God, though his son, and this means worshipping other gods is sin. But as Christians we must speak the truth in love, or people won’t listen to us. As Muslims, my tribe was very devoted to Allah and worshipping him. Our beliefs were a large part of our identity and culture, and when our missionaries wouldn’t worship with us and told us our god wasn’t real, it greatly offended us. When they rejected our beliefs, it was like they were rejecting us, and this definitely built a wall between us that they had to work hard at pulling down later on.
---->Along with this I learned that it’s important to get to know people before trying to tell them about your beliefs, and before trying to change theirs. Our missionaries told us about God fairly early in the UPG, before they really knew us or had developed any kind of a relationship with us. Admittedly, we were deliberately making it hard for them to get to know us, by acting distant and not talking a lot. But I think that was realistic, because I’m sure a lot of tribes wouldn’t just open right up to a bunch of foreigners showing up out of nowhere. It would have been a lot better if they had worked at getting to know us before trying to tell us about Jesus. I think that developing that relationship is part of sharing your faith gently, so that you have somewhere to start from when you do begin to speak the truth of Christ, as opposed to the lies they have believed. It’s a lot easier to accept, and less offensive, when there is trust and love behind the message.
---->Because our missionaries did offend us and disrespect our beliefs, and also our culture by singing, which was one of our taboos, we treated them pretty harshly. We made them get in the nearby freezing cold pond when they wouldn’t worship Allah with us, and we made them start their own fire after one of them accidentally hit our chief’s daughter with a piece of firewood. This all took place on Friday night, and although we had a brief peaceful interlude Saturday morning, the tension grew worse Saturday afternoon after the tribal meeting. There the government(our leadership here, who were running the LTE) told us that the missionaries were responsible for the death of other tribes’ people, we believed them. Our chief teamed up with the chief of our neighboring tribe and decided to punish our missionaries together. We made them get back in the pond for a long time, and then made the girls watch while the guys rolled in the sand and we taunted them.
---->It was some fairly intense persecution, for a role-playing LTE. Looking back, I think it would’ve been better if we had been a bit nicer, although I really didn’t have much say in the matter, because in my role I was the tribe’s outcast. But although I wish we would have toned it down, I know we all learned a lot from that time. For us tribal members, it was their perseverance, their words of love and kindness to us, and their faithfulness to God in the midst of it, that really began to tear down the walls we’d set up. After that all happened, we made them leave our camp, and we weren’t sure if they’d come back. But we knew that if they did, we’d be willing to listen. Thankfully, they did come back, and all but 3 members of our tribe ended up getting saved.
---->Although after Friday night I wouldn’t have expected it to happen, surprisingly, most of what I learned during the LTE was because of our missionaries. Yes, they made quite a few mistakes, and we did too. We all could have been a lot more prepared. But through their example I learned what not to do, like disrespect people’s culture and beliefs, and try to change people without knowing them. More importantly though, I learned some valuable things to do, like love people unconditionally, and persevere in spite of hardships. The thing that struck me the most is that actions really do speak louder than words, especially if you’re from different cultures and speak different languages. They probably didn’t realize it, but we were watching them all the time. No matter what the missionaries said, we weren’t willing to listen to them until their actions starting lining up with their words. When that happened, it made all the difference, and lives were changed.

~The end!

OH, and here's a picture . . . this is what I looked like for most of the LTE, except my hair was pulled back by a scarf, and I probably smiled every now and then.