Landscape. Machinery. People

Alicja Iwanska a Polish anthropologist, divided the world of human beings into three categories from Western farmers perspective.

The first category is landscape. Distant mountains, trees, scenery and the un-manipulated environment. As mush to the enjoyment, it does not have any emotional content of relation for the viewers.

The second category is machinery. They have high value and cared for it because it is important to them to increase their productivity.

The third category is people. Friends, neighbors. They are human beings with whom they live, grow up and died with, and with whom one has constant emotional relationships on the social and business level.

Interestingly, how we often view human beings is similar to the analogy above.  We tend to view them as landscape and machinery, but not people! In the church, for instance, how many people do we look merely as landscape? They might look good and interesting, but had no emotional content whatsoever to us, in which we are not even bothered with it. And how many people do we view as machines? A friend of mine shared that some people in her young adult ministry felt that they were just being used in the ministry, just as those machinery. They are being cared for and kept in their proper place as long as they do us good.  We like to have them around as long as they keep their place and do not disturb our circle of comfort zones. How utterly characteristic is the tendency for us as Christians to look on human beings as machinery! This is exactly how the world views human beings these days!!

What we need to do now is to come to the fundamental realization of a human being in order to make a change. If we are going to be persons among people, our privacy, our established patterns of what convenient and comfortable are to be drastically modified. Our sense of belonging to ourselves will have to be filed away and we will have to develop a sense of belonging to others.

Are we ready to answer the call to be the salt and the light? 

Are we ready, as Paul says to “become all things to all men so that by all means we might win some”?

Extracted from William A. Smalley’s The World Is Too Much With Us