Walking from East to West: God in the Shadows

by Ravi Zacharias

If you travel to the north of India, you will see the most magnificent saris ever made, and Varanasi is where the wedding saris are handwoven. The gold, the silver, the reds, the blues — all the marvelous colors threaded together are spectacular. These saris are usually made by just two people — a father who sits on a platform and a son who sits two steps down from him. The father has all the spools of silk threads around him. As he begins to pull the threads together, he nods, and the son responds by moving the shuttle from one side to the other. Then the process begins again, with the dad nodding and the son responding. Everything is done with a simple nod from the father. It’s a long, tedious process to watch. But if you come back in two or three weeks, you’ll see a magnificent pattern emerging. This is an image I always remind myself of: we may be moving the shuttle, but the design is in the mind of the Father. The son has no idea what pattern is emerging. He just responds to the father’s nod.

You see, to an Easterner, one cannot pass judgments or make evaluations on the present without equally taking the past into consideration, in a very linear fashion. This, of course, is a tendency that has its good and bad side, for in the East history and ancestry never die. The very life you live is a debt from the past.

That speaks of the deep etchings of culture upon the Eastern soul. In a proverbial sense, soil and soul define the “I” and the “U,” and if we do not understand this, we will never understand the East. Religion, language, and ancestral indebtedness are carved into the consciousness of every child of the East. And this is precisely what makes conversion to any other faith an upheaval of titanic proportions.

With the world increasingly becoming a crossroads between East and West, being bicultural helps to answer the crucial question, “How can I connect with the soul of this man or this woman?” I understand very well what is being said by a fellow Indian, even when the words he’s using may be very different from what he actually means to convey. In Eastern culture, appearance and essence are implicitly accepted as two different parts of reality and can oppose one another. Indeed, it is very common in many Eastern cultures to live a bifurcated life. For instance, your religious life and your moral life are not necessarily connected. It is perfectly acceptable for a man to light holy candles, walk out of the temple, and then lie through his teeth about what he’s selling you. The incredible thing is that it may not even qualify as hypocrisy, because he genuinely believes that the rules of engagement in commercial enterprises are different from his life of ceremony and superstition. The theorist from the East may challenge what I am saying, but he or she can never deny its accepted reality. Life is a bargain, and you negotiate the best deal for yourself. That’s just the way it is. In fact, there is a Middle Eastern proverb that says, “The lie is the salt of man.” You season everything you do with a lie. Everyone ends up finding how to skirt around the truth and appear honorable.

Sometimes in the shadows of one’s self lie the problems, and in the shadows of one’s shaping lie the answers.

“God alone knows how to humble us without humiliating us, and how to lift us up without flattering us.”

“Sacrilege is often defined as taking something that belongs to God and using it profanely. But there is a bigger sacrilege we commit all the time. That is to take something and give it to God when it means absolutely nothing to us.”

I don’t blame my father for my failures up to that point in my life. But I do believe he made a mistake. I am a father myself, and I believe my dad should have taken me aside to talk. As best as he was able, he should have said, “Son, sit down, I want to speak with you. Tell me, what’s going on inside you? Why are you living this lie? Why are you doing this to yourself? Where is it you want to go in life? And how can I help you get there?” I think that, in general, many fathers don’t want to have this talk. For whatever reason, they would rather avoid it. They seem to think that things will correct themselves. Or, they hope someone else will come along who can enter their son’s or daughter’s life and offer some answers and direction.

This is important to know. When someone from another culture hears the simple strains of Jesus’ message, there is a vagueness in the beginning because you are not quite sure how it all fits into your culture’s context. You just add anything new; there is never a subtraction. Something happened for me that would make a difference, but the road was still foggy.

Chesterton says, in essence, that there is a dislocation of humility in our times. We have become more confident in who we are and less in what we believe. Our pride has moved us from the organ of conviction to the organ of ambition, when it is intended to be the other way around. In short, our confidence should be in our message and not in ourselves.

The Austrian concentration camp survivor Viktor Frankl wrote, “Without meaning, nothing else matters. With meaning, everything else falls into place.” If you can’t see the why, you cannot live for the what. And as soon as I was able to answer the “why,” even my failures began to make sense.

Yet, from everything I had learned in my life with Christ, I knew that He had not just changed what I did but what I wanted to do.

I don’t think older Christians can ever fully know what an important role they play in the affirmation of younger believers. When you’re just a youth, it means so much to have someone who’s farther along the road say to you, “I see something in you, and I want you to be encouraged in it.”

Note to self...

You can talk a lot about God, Ravenhill wrote in essence, and you can know a lot about God, yet you can know very little of God in your relationship with Him. I did not want that to happen to me. I remember one paragraph he shared about prayer, quoting the famed Saint Chrysostom: The potency of prayer hath subdued the strength of fire; it hath bridled the rage of lions, hushed anarchy to rest, extinguished wars, appeased the elements, expelled demons, burst the chains of death, expanded the gates of heaven, assuaged diseases, repelled frauds, rescued cities from destruction, stayed the sun in its course, and arrested the progress of the thunderbolt. Prayer is an all-sufficient panoply, a treasure undiminished, a mine which is never exhausted, a sky unobscured by the clouds, a heaven unruffled by the storm. It is the root, the fountain, the mother of a thousand blessings.

God has an appointment with each of us, and it is critical that every man and woman know this. He will stop our steps when it is not our time, and He will lead us when it is. This is a reassuring truth to know for every believer, and a necessary trust for anyone who ministers in areas of great risk.

When God puts a broken life back together, He removes the scars because He builds from the inside out. And when God steadies a faltering life, He puts you on His footing.

I still have some of my scars

Donald Coggan, the 101st Archbishop of Canterbury, once said that the longest journey in the life of one’s belief is from the head to the heart. My own life was testimony to this fact. The truth that had gone into my head had rescued my heart from its turmoil. Allow me to elaborate a bit on Coggan’s maxim. If we say that a sexual union is sacred — if marital love is exclusive and cannot be compromised — then it stands to reason that if you violate that sanctity, your emotions will be in keeping with the violation. Likewise, if it is rationally sound that Jesus rose again from the dead, the heart should delight that this life is not the end. Or, if it is rationally sound that the home is a gift of God, then family life is emotionally invigorating. In short, if the reasoning is sound, the feelings will follow. Feelings follow belief; belief, then, should follow truth.

“If you speak to a hurting world, you will never lack for an audience.”

Whether you’re in a visible position like mine or embedded like Koos Fietje, you have to learn that you cannot claim a path just because it is less intimidating. You must keep in mind that God does have an appointment with you, that there is a cost to serving him. At the same time, you have to be wise and not careless. To deny the reality that there are some places where you cannot go is to play the fool. More important, if you have not learned to pay the smaller prices of following Christ in your daily life, you will not be prepared to pay the ultimate price in God’s calling.

Apologetics is not just giving answers to questions — it is questioning people’s answers, and even questioning their questions. When you question someone’s question, you compel him or her to open up about his or her own assumptions. Our assumptions must be examined.

This book is full of these gold nuggets

If you’re predictable in your approach — if your listeners know where you’re going — they will turn you off. If you hand people outlines, they’re already ahead of you, just filling in blanks. If you tell them they need love, they already know that. The task is to find the means to stretch their thinking in unpredictable ways, to take them in directions they are not expecting to go. Sometimes it is through an argument, sometimes through an illustration, sometimes through a stretch of the imagination. But you’ve got to take them in a radius of directions, like the spokes of a wheel. That is an Easterner’s natural way of thinking, while the typical Westerner’s way is more linear.

If you have a very particular individual calling like mine, you can become so focused on it that you lose sight of the bigger picture. I’m convinced that the most difficult task in leadership is to build the right team — and we now have a fine one at RZIM, but it hasn’t been without its bumpy roads. The biggest price you pay is when you do not choose the right people for certain tasks. That is not to impugn them; it’s just to say it’s not fair to you and even to them. You can pick a wonderful person for a job, but if he or she is not right for the task, you’re in double jeopardy.

Conversely, you can become so focused on the bigger picture that you forget the individual call that God has placed upon you. I have always underestimated what God was trying to do in my calling. And when you underestimate that, you are at fault, because you do not prepare adequately. I’m a preacher and writer, not an administrator. But inevitably you must administer your role as a leader.