Andree Seu
Andrée Seu is a Senior Writer for WORLD and author of Won't Let You Go Unless You Bless Me and Normal Kingdom Business. A graduate of Westminster Seminary, she has four children and was widowed in 1999. She offers daily thoughts at worldontheweb.com.

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Message from Morocco

Relationship-building is the task overarching the to-do list | by Andrée Seu

It's almost comical. I have felt under pressure to be more active in the various programs of my church. But now this missionary from Morocco blows into town and tells our Sunday school class that we need to slash our to-do list by half and cultivate relationships—thus adding "relationship cultivation" to my to-do list.

With de Tocqueville-like lucidity, Ms. B contrasts the leisurely greetings and spontaneous assemblies in her north African home (where it is considered more honoring to drop in than to make an appointment) to the dismissive "let's do lunch" of her country of origin (where it is considered more polite to make an appointment than to drop in).

This is no idle philosophical harp strumming but an issue on which we all de facto take sides many times a day—every time the phone rings and the door knocks. WWJD is still a good question, because "whoever says he abides in Him ought to walk in the same way in which He walked" (1 John 2:6). The bugbear, of course, is how Jesus would "walk" if he were born in 1980. He lived in a time and place more like Morocco than America. What do we say to this? Is the right thing to contextualize Jesus' walk to our BlackBerry culture? Or is the right thing to muscularly resist the BlackBerry culture that carries us away from the simplicity of Jesus' lifestyle?

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