Welcome back to the Fourth Wave podcast. Today, are continuing our series on incarnation by looking at a third type of incarnation. So far, we have discussed proximate incarnation and positional incarnation. Proximate incarnation is the simplest form, and simply involves being in proximity to another. By being where those in need are, you gain the ability to see their situation and be of immediate assistance.

You can see what's going on firsthand and you don't have to have the situation relayed to you. The second form of incarnation we discussed was positional incarnation or social incarnation. This form of incarnation is one where an individual places themselves into the same oppressive structures or situations as another. That can range anywhere from simply walking with the outcast and showing solidarity with them, taking on the hate of others. This is as basic as my story of walking side by side with a Roma man through the store, which was just uncomfortable, all the way to being killed for such solidarity like we see in slavery and the civil rights movement with some white abolitionists or civil rights workers.

The third type of incarnation which we're going to talk about today, I'm going to call experiential incarnation. Experiential incarnation is just like it sounds. It's a way we can incarnate to another through our experiences. Now with the first two incarnations we mentioned, you have a whole lot of choice in the matter. You can choose where you go or where you live, so you can choose to be approximately incarnate.

At the same time, if you understand the culture's expectations and taboos, positional incarnation is also largely a choice, though not to quite the same extent as proximate incarnation. When we invited the Roma into our house and experienced the disdain of our neighbors or when white workers walked in solidarity with blacks through the South during the Civil Rights era and experienced persecution, positional incarnation is usually a choice. Experiential incarnation however is often not a choice. I don't know what it's like to feel the vulnerability of being robbed or having my house broken into. I don't know what it's like to be raped.

I don't know what it's like to have a parent die. I don't know what it's like to have a child commit suicide. I don't know what it's like to be an alcoholic. These life defining experiences are not choices that I can make nor are they choices that I would be moral in making for myself. Many experiences just happen to us.

In some ways, this passive aspect of the incarnation may make it seem like it would be a less powerful type of incarnation. Shouldn't it be more meaningful to someone if I choose to enter their world? Why would the fact that something bad happened to me be meaningful to someone else? Yet we all know that this is probably the most powerful type of incarnation. If I haven't experienced the loss of someone to suicide, it's very hard for me to speak into the life of someone who's going through that experience.

What are we to do then if we can't choose to enter this most powerful of the incarnations? First, I think it's important to note that while we can't choose to enter these experiences nor do we want to willfully enter them, we can put ourselves in positions to have some of these relevant experiences. The Christian's call is to reach out especially to the outcast and the vulnerable. If we move into the slums, the cities, the ghettos, the shanty towns or wherever there's poverty, crime and oppression, we end up living lives which are more likely to lead to the experiences such as being robbed, assaulted, etcetera. If we give up our wealth and our comfort and move to be approximately incarnational, and if we live next to the addict and the prostitute and become positionally incarnational, chances are that we will either directly experience some of these terrible but powerful experiences or at least love and walk with those who experience them and by extension, have very strong vicarious experiences.

When we give up our power and position, we make it more likely that we'll experience hunger, want, health problems, lack of access to facilities, etcetera. Second, I don't think we're called to have every experience that someone else has nor are we to necessarily seek those things out. Each of our lives has a unique trajectory and most of us will have at least one powerful, relevant, tragic experience to connect us with others. While we may not bring about a plethora of tragic experiences on ourselves, it's important to view our experiences not as individual experiences, but as experiences for the community. We're just beginning to see this done with miscarriage in our society as more and more women are starting to talk about what was once hushed, a hushed up subject.

How many women were broken to pieces inside because their experiences weren't able to be shared with others? Others couldn't incarnate to them and meet them where they were nor could they incarnate to other women later on after they had had walked through the same pain. While experiential incarnation isn't something we can fully choose in any particular direction, we all have experiences that we can choose to use incarnationally. So I think it's pretty obvious how experiential incarnation can help provide us with credibility to others who have experienced something similar. We can't substitute tragic experiences for knowledge as knowledge just doesn't mean as much in tragedy.

But there's another aspect of experiential incarnation which I think is important. Experiential incarnation doesn't just provide others with the feeling of solidarity and credibility towards us, it also provides us with genuine empathy towards those in need. The best example I can think of in our own lives is when our son who was born in Romania, had a lot of health issues. He was in the hospital for a week or two at a time and this happened three or four times within the first six months of life. In that time, we get to experience the Romanian healthcare system in public hospitals.

Some of our experiences were great and much better than experiences we would have had in The States, and other aspects were not great. We learned that men couldn't go into the hospital with the women and children, so my wife was all on her own when she went into the hospital with my son. She learned that you were supposed to bring your own food and even your own toilet paper, and she didn't know that when she went in, so that was kind of a surprise. We obviously weren't prepared for that the first time around. When she was in the hospital, she saw how full the infant room was and that many of the snotty crying infants got no attention due to how overcrowded it was.

Whether those children were abandoned or whether their mothers just couldn't stay in the hospital with them, they were largely ignored other than at feeding times. Again, not due to lack of consideration on the nursing staff but just because of the limited resources. In those hospital stints, my wife was able to connect with a number of women and was able to glean a lot of information from them, just from their stories. And through those hospital stays, we were able to learn about the system. While this information was helpful to us as we worked with some Roma who had many stories about their needs with medicine and hospitals, claims that we could then validate or negate from first hand experience, our experience was just as valuable.

To be able to share stories about how we were vulnerable to illness, how we experienced the hospitals, it just added an element of credibility and humanity to us. But beyond the credibility, it helped us to empathize with those who had medical needs and claims. We were able to see what they had to go through and how trying of a time it really could be. And when we were able to have genuine empathy rather than cold skepticism in our conversations about needs, it helps our hearts too. And I'm sure it helps the way that we come across in conversation to others.

So yeah, experiential incarnation is important for our credibility but it's also helpful for our hearts and ministry to know what others are experiencing and to have this added component of empathy. We can't always choose the experiences to experience events, but when we do, it's vital that we are willing to be humble and share those events and to use those experiences communally and kingdom mindedly. That's all for now. So peace and because I'm a pacifist, when I say it, I mean it.