The Humble Inquiry

One of the most exciting and yet simultaneously exhausting things about living here in Deutschland is making new relationships. Whether it's in German or English, we're making new friends and building new relationships all the time. When we first arrived, meeting new people was fun and interesting and life giving. We were so curious about everyone and their story. But now that we're at the 10-month mark, it's harder to be excited about meeting yet another person! With a language barrier, it's hard to share yourself and really be understood.

However, our leader challenged us with this idea he read in a book called The Humble Inquiry: Do we build our relationships based on the fact that we want to be known, or because we want to know others?

The main concept of the book is that you have to ask good questions to draw someone out; you have to build a relationship based on curiosity and interest in the other person. It's an art that's essential to collaboration, culture, change, and leadership. Basically, it's making a relationship based on a genuine interest not in yourself but in someone else. It's not about making yourself heard but about learning about the other person. A challenge in humility.

Thankfully, working cross-culturally in a global pandemic is a rich environment in which self-pride can be stripped away and replaced with more humility. We want to mature into humble, wise people after a lifetime of character growth. But how do we start becoming like that? A few weeks ago, Jacob got a word from the Lord that compelled him to ask for more humility (a scary thing to ask), especially in the midst of processing culture shock. And last week, the Lord spoke to Callie, "If you're humble enough, anything is possible."

We've been meditating on this, and we believe it starts with dying to self and pouring into others. We can say, How can I get out of 2020? Or we can say, What can I get out of 2020? It is up to us whether we leave this trial empty-handed and exhausted or mine it for treasures that the Lord wants to give us through dependence on him. So we're making new relationships with fresh eyes. We don't care if people know us. We care if people know Jesus through us.

About the author: Callie Ferguson left her home in Oklahoma to serve as a field worker with refugees in Hamburg, Germany, with her husband, Jacob, and two children, Rory and Ian.

allnations.international