Forget excellence, pursue generosity

When I meet a Japanese person, the conversation after the basic greetings often goes like this:

Them: “Wow, your Japanese is good.”

Me: “No, no, no! I have to study more.”

Them: “Really? I think it’s enough.”

And of course I will continue to politely insist that I am utterly embarrassed by my lack of language ability, but, truth be told, I think they’re right. For most interactions I have in Japan my current level is “enough”. I can get on with daily life tasks, and I can take part in Bible studies and meetings. I avoid most cultural blunders now. My language and cultural understanding is sufficient for being a missionary.

But we are not meant to settle for enough. We are meant to strive for excellence, right? After all, “God honours excellence,” or at least, “excellence honours God”.

But here I politely agree and disagree. If we are committed to serving the church of Japan, we should seek to keep learning and growing in our language skills and cultural understanding throughout our lives. But this should come not from a desire to attain excellence but rather from a heart of generosity towards our Japanese friends and colleagues.

This distinction is important for a few interconnected reasons:

Generosity aids humility

It is very difficult to aim at excellence and remain humble. Sure, there are some people who are—or at least who appear to be—but I find the humblest people do not talk much of excellence. Personally, if I start to think of myself as being or becoming excellent at something, then I will either drift or dash towards pride. To talk of excelling at something, you have to compare yourself with others. And even if we are only looking at our previous self, aiming for excellence will lead to either unrealistic goals and pressure (“I must be better!”) or laziness and pride (“I am the best!”). But generosity and humility go together as best friends: they take our focus off us and place it on others. Indeed, they are great allies in the battle for self-forgetfulness.

Generosity guides learning

Striving to be excellent at Japanese is what leads many a young man to spend hours memorizing all 29 strokes for the kanji for “depression” 「 鬱」, ignorant of the fact that it is normally written in hiragana: うつ. Such Japanese knowledge may impress some, but it doesn’t actually help anybody.

But generous lifelong learning is other-focused, and so we don’t have to think, What is the next step that I should master? We simply ask, What do I need to improve to serve and bless those I am working with? Lifelong language learning should be about us working diligently to be understood well so that the people we are ministering to don’t have to work hard to understand us. For me, knowing pop cultural references from the eighties and nineties will help me interact with the guys on my sports team much more than being able to read classical Japanese literature, and ironing out my pronunciation will bless people more than passing a high-level kanji test.

Generosity kills comparison

Our ministry situations and life stages are different and so generosity in language and cultural study will be different for each of us. I’m a native English speaker, a single man in my mid-thirties, whose ministries all involve using Japanese. It’d be ridiculous to compare how much ongoing language learning I do with, say, a married woman from Brazil with multiple children they are trying to raise to be tri-lingual whilst doing ministries that involve using lots of English (their second language!). We simply have different amounts of time and energy to give towards study. In the same way, I have less energy now than I did ten years ago and so I don’t beat myself up now for not spending as much time memorizing vocabulary as I did back then. Generosity looks different for different people and so there is no space for comparison.

Generosity drives us to the gospel

Excellence requires discipline for the sake of your future self, and that’s hard. But to be generous, you have to make joyful sacrifices for the sake of others, and that’s impossible! At least it is impossible apart from the power of the gospel. God’s Word tells us that even the most excellent Japanese spoken without love is nothing more than a clanging gong. But love is not something we can learn from a textbook; we must receive it from God before we can live it out. Therefore much, much more important than lifelong learning is daily dependency on Christ, and a pursuit of generosity will keep pushing us back to him and his grace.

Excellence may honour God, but I am not sure I can be driven by it without causing heart attitudes that would displease him. I am confident that generosity in lifelong learning is a way to both honour God and serve people. And that drives me to keep up the hard work of language study now that the initial enthusiasm has worn out. I remain committed to a lifelong study of Japanese language and culture, but I’ve given up excellence. Instead I am striving to be generous.