From "Night Shift"

I'm taking a break from blogging for a couple days as I work to meet a deadline in getting my book, Night Shift, to my editor this weekend. The current posting series, "The Truth Shall Set You Free," will return next week, but for now, here is an excerpt from Night Shift, to be published later this year:

There is a state of being to be valued more highly than becoming "Native." That is the state of being Real, and as the Velveteen Rabbit discovered, through which there is immense power to accomplish much good.

Written by Margery Williams nearly a century ago, "The Velveteen Rabbit" is a children's story about a stuffed toy that is loved by a boy and eventually comes to life. The rabbit becomes real only after he has lost his newness and has been reduced to a tattered state of wornness through much use.

If we are to become real to those among whom we serve, we will have to sacrifice our newness and our polish. We will have to become Real, not native. But this process is something that happens to us – like the Velveteen Rabbit, we do not seek after it. To become real means to become at once useful and expendable and extremely desired and valuable to others who are quite different from us. As the skin horse in the story says, "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."

Again, the initial period of language and culture learning is valuable in making friends, of presenting yourself as a learner to others eager to be master teacher to the newcomer. That means being willing to make mistakes and being curious about the way others think. I remember well the amazement I felt when Dr. Robert Bolton, a scholar of Chinese languages and culture as well as of missiology, began asking for my observations on Chinese language and culture within weeks after I arrived in Taiwan. Here was a man who never lost his youthful desire and curiosity to grow, even from neophytes like me, who went on to earn his doctorate after retirement more for the growth than for the pedigree.

No matter at what stage we find ourselves in the assimilation process, humility and openness always make room for us in any new culture. Being real means getting out of your own skin, so to speak, and not worrying about what you look like. A child learns quickly because a child is less inhibited to look and act like a child, apparently a prerequisite for spiritual and personal growth. Once Jesus likened the door into the Kingdom of God as being as small as the "eye of a needle," a hyperbolic reference to the preposterous notion of the rich getting into God's culture apart from the power of God. (Mark 10:25) As Matthew quotes Jesus, "Unless we become like little children, we will never enter the culture we know as God's Kingdom." (Matthew 18:3)

Whether my neighbor Frank in Taichung or my co-worker Bill in Waco or Scott, the manager of my postal box in PDX, there are ready and willing mentors everywhere. And it is that very openness and humility in us as learners that makes us more effective communicators of the Gospel culture. For when our deliberate intent is to absorb for a higher purpose, the absorption becomes a two-way street because a spirit of absorption, engagement really, is contagious.

Real, not native, is the goal of incarnation.