Building Bridges

We have been doing a lot of reflection on the purpose and goals for our mission trip, and in the past week we benefited from the wisdom, insight and inspiration of two incredible people.

• We have been taking a Managerial Leadership class together at Kellogg, and last week was the last class. The topic of the last class was the importance of asking questions, especially the ones that people tend to avoid, and not always rushing to answer the questions. Prof. Buck asked us to think about our “living questions”, the ones we can’t answer but rather have to continue living until the answer appears.
  
  This immediately triggered in our minds the question “Why Africa?” Several people have asked us this question, and it is something we can’t answer. For some reason we feel called to Africa, and hope to begin discovering the answer when we are in Ghana.
  Also, there is nothing we love more than answers and solving problems. We are both highly task oriented and love checking things off our to-do lists. One thing we don’t do well is ask inquisitive questions in order to understand the perspectives and stories of others. Thankfully, this is not a dawning realization for us, but rather something we have been trying to improve. It is going to be critical in Ghana to ask questions in order to learn about how they think, feel, behave, react, etc to various situations.
  

• During church on Sunday, Rev. Dophus Weary, a pastor in Mendenhall, Mississippi, gave the sermon and summarized the goal of our mission trip perfectly. He said, “We are all called to build bridges between religions, races, economic statuses, and intellectual levels. We need to build a bridge to Jesus, a bridge between each other, a bridge between our family, and a bridge between people from different races.”
  
  We have a lot of bridges to build – between us and Femi (the IFES Associate General Secretary for Partnership and Collaboration); between Kellogg and IFES (to start an annual mission trip); potentially between English-speaking and French-speaking IFES organizations (if we pursue a short trip to Cote d’Ivoire); and between Americans and Africans.
  
  While this can definitely been seen as a daunting and scary task, it is important to remember that God calls us to love our neighbors as Jesus loved us, and anyone God brings into our lives is our neighbor. We are all connected by the blood of Jesus Christ!
  

Now when people ask what we are going to do in Ghana we reply with “ask questions and build bridges”. This usually leads to a look of confusion that enables us to explain further. It also provides the focus we needed for our trip.

One final thought from Rev. Weary to ponder, “Give a person a fish and they can feed for a day. Teach a person how to fish, and they can feed for life. What if a person knows how to fish, but doesn’t have a place to fish?”

Professor Buck and Reverend Weary, thank you for your sincere words, wisdom, and inspiration!