How do we reach others? How do we create an intentional way of making others feel seen? We firstly should look to Jesus and ask these questions to Him. ‘How did you reach others? How did you create an intentional way of making others feel seen?’ Jesus chose to see and reach others. He had a desire to understand us and care for us and if that meant becoming a smelly, odd human being, He was willing to do it. He was so willing that He laid His life aside and died for us to live. He did this because our world is broken and hurting and the only way to create an opportunity for there to be healing and happiness was through His body dying, and Him raising back from the grave more alive than ever before.
Why am I saying this all, you may ask? It is because He has asked of us to do the same. In a comparable way, when we choose to redefine unconsciously and consciously all that we know in our own culture, we are creating a bridge so that others can feel seen and sought after. In The Staircase Model, they use four steps that we can us to be able to understand how we break down what we know in order to connect with someone we may not know. The first being unconscious incompetence. When my dad first moved to France, having dinner with a family of remarkably high class, they screamed at him when he picked up the pizza with his fingers. He was unconsciously aware that he did anything against their cultural norms. How could he though? This was his automatic response coming from his own culture.
The next step in The Staircase Model is conscious incompetence. This is where you know that you should be acting differently in a culture that is not your own, yet you are unaware of how to act. Normally this means you lack the skills or knowledge of how to act in this cultural setting. When my family lived in France for a time, there were certain cultural norms that my parents already were aware of that my younger sister, and I were not fully aware of. However, because we were immersed in the culture, we were competent enough to know we needed to learn more and so we did.
This was when we reached the next step, conscious competence. As you reach this step, you can see the difference between your culture and the one you are apart of now. You hear the tone changes in the language, you sense the importance or values of things that are not similar to your own culture. You recognize the similarities of your own cultures as well and find crossover commonalities with those in one culture and your own. The fifth step, unconscious competence, is rarely reached. This is not just full immersion and fluency, but to the point of where you think and dream in this culture.
No matter which steps you have experienced or if you have experienced any of these steps at all, learning a new culture broadens your knowledge and changes the perception that you may have. Your perspective of the world is bigger and your heart for people gets bigger too. I view it as I explained in the beginning. It is a conscious decision to lay down your life in order to understand another’s life and to choose to see how they see so that you can reach them in an effective way.
“Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” John 15:13
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