Gullivers Lessons

If you haven’t seen the latest version of Gullivers Travels, I highly recommend it.  We were watching this movie on our first week here in Ethiopia and I couldn’t help but see some lessons that we can all learn from this story- especially for us as new comers in a foreign land. 

To give you a brief overview of the movie, the story is about Gulliver, who is a slightly immature, overly confident, yet very insecure, mailman who works for a large magazine company.  He likes a girl in his office where he delivers mail but can’t work up the courage to tell her.  He instead pretends to have some hidden writing skills and she asks him to put together some examples.  He freaks out then ends up copying and pasting off some other travel websites, which  she believes to be true.  She then offers him a small job and sends him away to the Bermuda Triangle to write his first piece.

 

On his way to the Bermuda Triangle he gets caught in a storm and wakes up on a beach where he is tied down by a whole lot of little people.  These little people try to capture him in a prison and he ends up using his size to the advantage of the Kingdom and helps to save them in their time of despair. They end up building him a nice big house, giving him whatever he wants and in light of this, he plays on their great admiration for him by making up stories about what his life was like before he came to their town.  He uses Hollywood films like Titanic and Star Wars to portray his former adventures.  He claims to be a king in his homeland and ends up being highly exalted.  Until one day, one of the potential Princes, who was on to Gulliver’s lies and who turned against him after Gulliver convinced his princess that she was in love with another man, decided to attack Lilliput and made himself a suit that outsized Gulliver. 

Gulliver’s lies all came to light and he ended up being imprisoned once again.  His boss from the magazine who he liked, also found out about his lies and came looking for him and the story he was meant to be doing.  She ended up in Lilliput too and thrown into the prison.  She discovered that Gulliver had told everyone that she was his queen and therefore found out about his little crush on her.  Together they went out to save Lilliput from the enemy that had overthrown them and they came out victorious and they lived happily ever after. 

This whole movie reminded me that WE as westerners, people coming from a developed and blessed country, could be tempted to feel like Gulliver.  We could come here and think that we were “bigger” than them and have so much to offer them.  We could feel a false sense of security because the land that we come from, the society that we were living in and the opportunities that we were exposed to offer us some stories that we can relate to and relay to those who will listen. 

There is a temptation, even as Westerners still living in Western society, to feel like we have so much to offer to the third world.  That actually, we ARE heroes, that we have SO MUCH MORE, and that we DESERVE to have better homes, to be waited on by those who have less and that perhaps, we can solve and fight any battle for those who are too small to fight for themselves.  That would be REALLY impressive and would ultimately give our egos some good stroking.

 

However, like Gulliver, we would or should soon discover that this perception, is a fallacy.  That actually, this community or country, or land that we have just landed in, are not in NEED of us.  There story of survival preceded our arrival.  There tactics for defeating their enemies have been proven effective and they are actually going from strength to strength.  Though they look defeated and small, they are actually no different from us.  They go through the same struggles and they celebrate similar victories.  They value relationships and pursue them with greater courage than we ever could.  They have a culture that exceeds our knowledge and place a higher value on the important issues in life and a lower value on things that we value too much. 

Perhaps if Gulliver had stayed true to who he was, the people of Lilliput could help HIM gain the confidence that he needed to be a REAL Hero in his world.  This takes humility and an attitude of learning.  We need the same combination.  We need humility and an attitude of learning – of coming alongside our brothers and sisters and listening to their stories, hearing the cries of THEIR hearts and not thinking that WE are the solution, but helping them to find THEIR Solution.

 

Asaua and Abraham -his right hand man on the field

The Bible says this “The rich and poor have this in common, Jehovah is the maker of them all.”  Proverbs 22:2.  This morning we asked our co-ordinator to explain a picture that was hanging on the wall of the guest house. . It is a picture of Jesus hanging on the cross and below each of his hands is a man on a scale.  On the right is a rich man and on the left a poor man.  The scales are equal, showing that God weighs both the same.  However, below each man is a conversation they are having with Jesus, written in Amharic.  The basic message of the rich man was that he was thankful to God for all his blessings, and God told him that it was not just for him but so that he can help to meet the needs of the poor.  The poor man was thankful to God also for all that he had and God told him that he was blessed because, though he had little, he still believed and trusted in God.   James 2:5 says “Listen, my beloved brothers, has not God chosen the poor of this world rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom which He has promised to those who love Him?”  So who really is the richer? We may be richer this side of heaven, but on the other side, the poor of this world will be heirs of the kingdom and will receive abundant blessings for the rich faith that they display.  We are now discovering how much we have to learn from our Ethiopian brothers and sisters.  They have rich faith and gratefulness to God like we have not yet experienced.