otherness

One of my really good friends is in seminary and wrote about our last trip to Rwanda in a final paper. She said, “In this otherness, which is someone else’s someplace, someone else’s home, you are left grasping for something familiar until you accept that all familiarity is gone and you must allow the otherness to come in.” This may be one of the most profound theological statements I have ever come across. It cuts to the heart of our faith and what it means to be a follower of Jesus Christ. As a people called to live in a world not our own this otherness is a place we must seek to find. I think that is perhaps why so many people go away on a mission trip to some foreign place and come back to find that though they went to change a life it was theirs that was transformed.