God of the other - a gradual learning curve
God of the other - a gradual learning curve
31 October 2022
Others Online writer Jessica Morris (pictured centre row, second from left at age 23) experienced God more deeply as she met people of different backgrounds, beliefs and cultures through her travels.
For years, everyone I knew looked, sounded and believed the same thing. Growing up in suburban Victoria, I belonged to a middle-class family with a mum, dad, two kids and a dog. Descended from British immigrants and convicts (who apparently stole a loaf of bread and a watch), my status in life was set from birth. Add in my strong Christian upbringing, rooted in The Salvation Army, and I was a very sheltered child.
If you had met me, you would have thought I was a sweet but rather dogmatic kid. My view of the world was two-dimensional – things were good or bad, and as a Christian, it was my duty to do the right thing. Sure, part of that was loving my neighbour – something Jesus instructs us to do in the book of Mark, chapter 12 – but I wrestled with a sense of judgement towards people who weren’t living the ‘right’ way. And that went for how people acted in relationships, spoke, dressed, worshipped and well ... you get the idea. I had good intentions, but I had put God into a box. He looked and sounded just like me.
I began to see the face of God more clearly when I hit my teenage years. Diagnosed with anxiety and depression at 13, I began to better understand why other people also struggled. When I attended university, the doors were flung wide to new ideas, questions and beliefs – and the people living out those ideas weren’t scary. In fact, they showed me love and acceptance that felt foreign. Over and over, I would ask myself, “Who is Jesus, and how would these people meet him?”. How could my rigid two-dimensional God mean something to a single mother, a survivor of abuse, a refugee, or a devout Muslim?
When I began travelling to different countries, I soon learned that God was bigger and more complex than I could imagine. I saved money serving pizza and pasta to fly to the United States, unaware this was an opportunity afforded me due to my privileged upbringing. But that is the grace of God, isn’t it? Because while it took me years to learn about generational and cultural injustice, the very people I was once afraid of, my new ‘neighbours,’ taught me that God is in the face of the other.
“God went from being a cardboard cut-out to a 4D technicolour, interactive experience”
I saw God in the warmth and courage of a friend who came out as non-binary. I saw God in the joy of a tattooed non-profit activist. I saw God in the hospitality of a black woman who quickly became like family to me. I saw God in the Iranian man fighting for his life when all he saw were barbed wire fences.
The fact I encountered God through these people had nothing to do with me – it had everything to do with their grace. They loved me thoroughly before I knew how to love them unconditionally. And God went from being a cardboard cut-out to a 4D technicolour, interactive experience. A God who truly was, and is, the other. And when I think of Jesus and remember that he was an oppressed Jewish man and a refugee, I realise there is far more to God than rules. He is a God who has left traces of his grace in every human. A God who asks us to ‘love our neighbour’ because when we do so, we genuinely love him.
I can’t say I love people perfectly now, but, every day, by seeing the image of God in people I don’t yet understand, I am becoming more like Jesus. And that means I am learning to love my neighbour.
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