Missionary journeys and synesthesia

For some people, words literally trigger physical senses or involuntary emotional reactions.  It is called synesthesia and includes things like tasting, smelling, or physically "feeling" or experiencing a word.

It's a neurological phenomenon that affects a small number of people naturally and a slightly larger number who have it triggered by outside variables.

It might not be exactly the same thing, but certain words, names, or ideas have that kind of impact for me.  Probably because some experiences in life coincided with other experiences, things got tied together in my mind.

It's especially true for things that have to do with names, locations, and other situations described in the Bible.  

That's likely the case because whenever I heard certain words or stories on a repeated basis, I was probably around other stimuli that tied them together and left a feeling, a sense, or a word picture, imprinted in my mind.

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For example, whenever I heard the term "missionary journey" - like the often told stories about the apostle Paul's different travels in the first century - I'd picture or feel the same kind of feelings I got when missionaries would visit or be referred to at the local church I was part of growing up.

It took a long time in life to shake that feeling or that picture that would pop up in my head.  

When I would hear "missionary journey" or just stories about different missionaries, it wasn't always a bad thing, but it definitely had a weird connotation.  

Missionaries were people who were "mobile preachers".  They'd show up once every year or so and spend the weekend "with the church".

They were people who seemed to be selling us on how successful they were, how much we needed to support them, and how frugal they were going to be with money we gave.  And they desperately needed our money.  And we gave it.

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Some missionaries went to Africa.  Some went to South America or China.  

Many were regularly going into the Eastern European countries, risking their lives and their families for the chance to share the Bible with Communists, Russians, or Germans - who all blended together into one group of people before the presentations were over.

Missionaries were learning the languages of these other countries, figuring out how to work around local authorities and customs, and teaching the people "out there" how to do church like we did church and how to make God happy like we were making him happy.

In my mind, there were foreign buildings "out there" in other countries that missionaries were making smell like the church building we used.  

They were teaching people using the flannel graphs, charts, slide shows, etc that we were being taught with.  

They were spreading *us* to the world.

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Hopefully, as a person gets older, they learn a larger story and have their understanding fleshed out a good bit more.  

I learned more by going and being "on the field" where missionaries worked in Germany and Switzerland. I later had other experiences with "mission work" where I realized that the picture I had for so long was so small and incomplete.

I figured out later on that missionaries were as different a could be.  

What kind of missionary a person was depended on what tribe you came from, what school or college you went to, what ideas you had about church and the Bible, etc.  And yet, earlier in life, all of it was wrapped up with a very simplistic and comfortable picture that was pretty wrong.

Later, as I studied Paul and the stories of all the people in the New Testament, I realized even more how I had learned a LOT of simplistic and comfortable pictures.

I continued projecting those pictures back into scripture and it often resulted in me misunderstanding the cultural context of the different writings, people, and overall world that the good news of Jesus was unfolding into.  It actually even had helped me misunderstand what the good news of Jesus was.

I realized how some of the things I'd learned early on blinded me and prohibited me from hearing or seeing more information that was right there in the scriptures.

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Over the decades, I learned a lot more.

Paul, Peter, James, John, Barnabas, Timothy, and so many others were people from different backgrounds.

I had learned to paint them all with a broad brush as a collection of people who all agreed, had the same basic understandings of life, God, etc - the same understandings I'd been taught.

As I grew (and continue to study, reflect, and grow), I learned that it was NOT at all, at times, like I was taught growing up.  

I learned important things like the fact that Paul didn't agree with James on some very important things. 

I learned that the message the apostles and Jesus taught before and after the resurrection of Jesus were not exactly the same thing. 

I learned it took a painfully long amount of time before Jewish believers came to accept non-Jewish believers, and, even then, there were a lot of suspicions and cultural hurdles they had about each other that some of them never overcame, as we'd think.

I learned that the early church "practiced worship" very differently than my tribe "practiced", even though I'd been taught that we'd recaptured or "restored" what they early believers were doing in all the various groups that were spread out across the ancient Middle East.

I learned that even though some pretty awful, selfish things were going on "in the churches" that Paul didn't tell them they were bound for Hell unless and until they got their act together - quite the opposite.

I learned that "church" wasn't a word they used at all.  They had a lot of different descriptions applied to them that helped them understand where they stood with God - in a massively huge way.  

I learned that "church" was a word that was invented MUCH later and inserted into scripture in the places where the writers of the New Testament were talking about different collections of people who met in different cities and homes.  

It was a word describing a dynamic we'd likely call a people that share a certain lifestyle or philosophy that gets together today as a kind of support group to encourage each other and learn together.

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I am saying all of that in context of some people asking me to be a little more basic about what changed my mind about some of the "church things" and "God things" over the past few years.

I learned a lot of other things over time.  And they weren't always immediate "changing my mind" moments or changes.

Many of those changes took a lot of time - time to digest and process the information and then separate out my feelings and the imprinted ideas I had from childhood.

Just FYI to those who wondered.

Peace and goodwill.