Though I have no pictures of these things, they are memories I want to preserve, so I will end this series of Rehoboth posts with two of my favorite experiences from this trip.
One night the school's superintendent came to speak to us about what she has found it means to be Navajo and a Christian. She told of her people's dependence on superstitions and rules to keep goodness in their lives. She shared the bondage the Navajo people feel in having do things according to such specific tradition, less they get blamed for tragedies that in reality they have no control over. It is why she said the ministry of Rehoboth is so successful, because the staff is aware of the struggle and works hard every day to show and tell of the freedom that is found in Christ. Our speaker challenged us by saying, "I get so frustrated when people ask how I can be a Navajo and a Christian. It can be so easily turned. How can you be an American and a Christian? How can you be a human and a Christian? There is darkness in any culture and we all have to fight to be how God calls us to be."
Instead of finding all the ways her traditions contradict the the truth of scripture, she said she prefers to focus on how she can appreciate and honor her culture, yet redeem it and claim it for the Kingdom. She told the story of one of the most practiced of Navajo traditions. The Navajo people will bury the placenta of their babies on the east side of the hogan. It symbolizes the idea of "home" and is supposed to be a way of constantly calling and drawing a child home. If their placenta is buried, the child will never become estranged, they will never be in danger or perish, because they need to come back to their home, where a piece of them literally dwells. She loves the symbolism and beauty of this tradition and had to think hard about if she wanted to bury her children's placentas. She found peace with an alternative that others in the Rehoboth community had done-- bury their children's placenta on the east side of the church. If a child is to always feel a call or pull back to something, it should be to God and to His church.
The second story was from the night our group intentionally spent in the dark. The campus of Rehoboth sits at 6000 ft. elevation. It is in the middle of nowhere. And New Mexico enjoys over 300 days of clear skies a year. It makes it the perfect place for an observatory. One night we were invited to visit the Rehoboth observatory with the super informed high school science teacher as our guide to the night sky. He set the telescope for us to look at 5 amazing sights-- Jupiter, Saturn, a super nova, another galaxy, and a nebula cluster. I can not tell you how mind blowing this was. When I looked through that lens, I SAW SATURN!! Rings and all! Jupiter was brown striped and had 4 moons just like the pictures in our books. And the other galaxy was so far away, the light we saw from it left 250 million years ago! Psalm 8 says, "When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set into place, what is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him?" The peek into God's heavens was the perfect underscore to what we had been learning all week. God's children are precious. Every single one of them. Regardless of their differences or backgrounds, we glorify God and build His kingdom when we take the time to learn their story and show them love. Being mindful of and caring for one another, after all, is the model for how God, the great creator of the entire universe, treats us.
No comments:
Post a Comment