A Heart Does Better Listening Than Speaking

Life is a trip. God has put me on the road to service in the Navajo Nation. To see how the whole story began click here. I am making friends with a member of the Shiprock church. He is divorced and living alone. His wife and 9 year-old son live in Flagstaff. He gets to see him about once a month. He has traveled a very hard road, but is back to where he needs to be. He is a member of one of the church boards and a very hard worker. I had an opportunity to help him with a church building project last week. With my help, we finished the project in about 4 hours. Without my help, he would have probably finished it in about 3 hours! He is patient with me and I enjoy spending time with him. One of the things that the court told him, when he was divorced, was that he had to have a much better place to bring his son before the son would be allowed to visit him in his home. The house he lives in was terrible. A mission team that was here in Shiprock for 2 weeks worked almost exclusively on repairs and rebuilding of his house. There is still a week or two worth of work to be done by the next team or two we have here. The house looks much better and, by and large, he is pleased with the results. However, there is something that we overlooked. We had a 4th of July celebration at the church. I was talking to him about the changes to his house and how he liked them. He made a comment that really set me thinking. He said that he loved the work that had been done, but that he was afraid that some of the changes, moving pictures to paint walls, for example, were erasing memories. You all know me, it could easily have gone the other way, but at that moment, the ears to my heart were open instead of the mouth of my heart. His comment really made me stop and think. Many of our mission teams, and I include myself among that number, come here and work on houses. To us, they look poor, crude, and maybe even, by our standards, uninhabitable. It is so easy for us to overlook that, to the families that live in them, these aren't just houses, they are homes. They don't just represent shelter. They represent family. They represent memories. They represent a bit of pride in that they have a place to live and are not on the street. They may well represent all of the wealth in this world for the residents. Our attitudes, as Christ's representatives, must always be accepting. A really good attitude may or may not even be noticed, but a bad attitude will be recognized immediately. This is a lesson that I'm trying hard to carve into my heart forever. Love to you all, Ross