Question: "Colder or Warmer?" Answer: "Yes."

"Make them one, Father." - Jesus Christ

 

My daughter was dipping her feet in the bath water that I was running for her so I could find out if the temperature was to her liking.

 

"You want it colder or warmer?" I asked.

 

"Warmer."

 

So I turned the knob a little warmer and asked her to feel the flowing water. She looked at me, and said, "Warmer!" a little more emphatically.

 

"Okay!" I said, with an emphatic tone of my own, to point it out the inappropriateness of hers, as I made the water a little warmer.

 

She felt it, and looked at me with an incredulous look as if I was intentionally disregarding her instructions. My 5-year-old looked right in my eyes and said to me loudly, slowly, and as if I was only a 2-year-old, "WARM-ER!"

 

I felt the water to make sure I was, indeed, making it warmer...which I was. It was actually starting to get uncomfortably hot. I said, "Callie...I'm making it warmer, but it's starting to get hot."

 

Then she yelled, "I don't want it hot...I want it WARMER."

 

With an explosion of understanding sweeping through me, I realized that Callie was asking for something dramatically different from what I was delivering. In terms of water temperature, she knows 3 categories: "cold", "warmer", and "hot". So when I asked her if she wanted it colder or warmer, then she felt it and it was hot, she said "make it warmer."

 

The tension that was growing between us because of our slightly differing understandings of the same exact words lifted completely as we figured that out. But it took some work.

 

Oh, how I see this happen in our church. For example...

 

Everyone wants more evangelism - but to some that means getting more people in the building for Christ, and to others it means getting more people out of building into the lives of others for Christ.

 

Everyone believes in Bible study - but to some that means getting people into Bible classes more, and to others it means getting people into Bible living more.

 

Everyone believes in baptism - but to some that means giving baptism the same "salvational" weight as we give Christ himself, and to others it means using it as yet another of Christ's means of transforming people into his own image.

 

Everyone believes in worship - but some think it's what they do on Sunday morning, and others think it's what our lives are.

 

Everyone believes in God - but some think He's a divine police-man, some that He's a gentle Santa Claus, some that He's a frowning parent, some that He's a demanding boss, some that He's an uninterested Other, and still others think that He is just like them, whatever they have come to be.

 

These misunderstandings are not a huge problem of any consequence, in my opinion. At least they don't have to be. If all of us will just "stay in the tension" that is created because of our differing understandings of our Christian vocabulary lists, then we will actually and usually find an explosion of understanding of each other that will allow us to communicate, agree, and serve each other and with each other...as we follow God, worship God, baptize people into God, study the Bible about God, and evangelize the world for God.

 

Back at the bathtub, when Callie and I finally understood one another, it took humility from me to accept her definition of the words we were using (especially since I "knew she was wrong"). I then was able to teach her my definition of the same words. The laughter that she and I shared as we "played back" the tension we were throwing at each other actually increased our joy in that moment. If it hadn't happened, it would've been an uneventful filling of the bathtub.

 

I think many us run from the discomfort of misunderstandings between us way too soon. Too soon for us to know each other's hearts, too soon for us to feel the tension, too soon for us to have the explosion of understanding that would make us intimate allies. That would make us one in Christ.

 

But if we stayed long enough to become one, then we would have the glorious honor of being an answer to Christ's prayer to his Father recorded for us in John 17 - "Make them one, Father."

 

I wonder what Christ meant by that? "Make them one"?