The 200% person

I have been doing a lot of reading for the materials I am trying to prepare on creating a culture of peace. One book (Ministering Cross-culturally, by Sherwood Lingengelter and Marvin Mayers) has been very helpful in looking at relationships through the filter of culture. The authors quote someone else who called Jesus the 200% person--truly 100% God and yet 100% man. He was able to do that by being born into the "human culture". The book went on to say that whenever, in love, we "put on someone else's shoes" and try to see things from their perspective, we are imitating what Jesus did for us. I thought that was a very helpful insight.

The authors were talking about people who want to minister cross-culturally, but, it certainly applies in any relationship. If we want to learn to live in peace with another person, we need to be willing to look at things from their perspective, even if we don't agree.

That in itself wasn't a new idea for me --the importance of trying to understand how the other person sees a particular situation--but I hadn't thought about it in the sense that doing that is doing something that Jesus did. It cost Jesus so much to do that for me. It doesn't cost me very much to do that for someone else.