This local proverb speaks to the truth that if you try to do two things at once, you do neither of them well. The imagery of the saying has to do with trying to fit two animal heads (sheep, goat, cow, etc.) into one pot for boiling. Traditionally, this wouldn’t have been possible, given the size of the pots available. No, each head needed its own pot. Only then would it be boiled well enough, which really is important if you’re planning on eating the brains.
The wise laborer will learn to slow down, divide his work into separate parts, and then focus on those parts one at a time. I remember learning this lesson as a new dad who needed to divide my time between our part-time refugee ministry work and our part-time small business of selling Central Asian chai and Melanesian coffee to Louisville hipsters and seminarians. My most effective weeks were those when two days a week were set apart solely for the business and three days were set apart solely for the refugee work. When they mashed together on a given day, I ended up accomplishing much less and doing so with a much more anxious and cloudy brain.
To work well, divide your work into separate compartments – or into separate pots.
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This local proverb focuses on the connection between how we use our tongues and our experience (or lack thereof) of a mind at peace. Essentially, look at someone who runs their mouth, gossips, and lies, and you will find a person whose mind (and life) knows very little peace. But chances are very good that someone who knows how to control their tongue is also someone who knows some measure of rest and inner calm. This is just as true of the Central Asian bazaar as it is of Twitter and Facebook feuds.
The wisdom literature of the Bible has much to say in this regard. Consider Psalm 34,
[11] Come, O children, listen to me; I will teach you the fear of the LORD. [12] What man is there who desires life and loves many days, that he may see good? [13] Keep your tongue from evil and your lips from speaking deceit. [14] Turn away from evil and do good; seek peace and pursue it.
If you desire life, to see good, to have a mind and heart at peace, then the use of your tongue (including your keyboard) needs to be top priority.
What local oral tradition does not say is how someone can find the power necessary to actually tame the tongue, something that James 3:8 says is humanly impossible. As is so often the case, traditional wisdom knows the goal, but not the means. Believers, however, know this is only possible through the use of another’s tongue, another’s all-powerful saving word. When he has “brought us forth by the word of truth, that we should be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures,” (James 1:18) then – and only then – will be have tongues truly tamed and minds truly relaxed.
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This local proverb speaks about necessary mess. Valuable work brings certain costs and messes with it. This saying refers to someone who wants the reward of catching a fish, but without the unpleasant wetness that tends to come along with it. “Getting your hands dirty,” and “You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs” are close English equivalents to this idea. Or, simply, “No pain, no gain.”
This proverb would be used when someone is excited about a certain outcome but then balks at the cost required to achieve it. We’ve all seen it. Someone is totally with us as we cast vision and talk about the amazing potential of a certain work. But then we talk about what it actually takes to get there, how long it’s going to take – and we’ve lost them.
Proverbs like this are important for reminding us about the nature of reality. We are prone to illusions that we can easily gain wealth, influence, or ministry success without much hard work. But we live in a post-fall world. By and large, good fruit only comes through painful toil and sweat equity, by getting our feet wet. This applies to fruit in both the natural and spiritual realms. Starting a business is very hard. So is planting a church. Anyone who says otherwise is selling something.
Solomon also speaks of necessary mess – and how it can be evidence of good work being done. “Where there are no oxen, the manger is clean, but abundant crops come by the strength of the ox” (Prov 14:4). The logic is clear. If you want abundant crops, you need oxen. And oxen make messes.
Clean mangers and silver bullet ministry methods may sound great. But the kind of fruit that counts is costly – and yes, often very messy too.
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This proverb comes from Virgil’s Aeneid, referring to that infamous Trojan horse incident. I’m sure this proverb was true enough once, at least back in the day when Greeks were a dominant power in the Mediterranean world. Even now, when a military power leads with a gift, it’s wise to think twice before receiving it. You never know how that gift (or development loan) might be turned against your people – or at least what strings may be attached. This is just as true of today’s global powers as it was 2,500 years ago.
When it comes to missions, it could also be said, “Beware of missionaries wielding proverbs.” This is because, as we’ve come to see, local proverbs can be a great way to smuggle biblical truth past the defensive walls that might exist in the local pagan worldview. The difference is the intent of the incursion. The Greeks snuck in to conquer. We sneak in to serve.
As we’ve been sharing in front of different groups about heading back to Central Asia, I’ve repeatedly told the story of how finding a local proverb on trust greatly helped our team overseas. You see, the local believers in our corner of Central Asia have major trust issues. “We don’t trust any locals we didn’t grow up with” is the typical position. Local believers will hold firm on this, even when it comes to interacting with others who profess Christ. Often an introduction of one local believer to another will later be followed by each separately approaching us, quietly warning us not to trust the person we just introduced them to because they are likely a “bad” person. This dynamic makes church planting and even small group Bible study formation next to impossible, unless it’s made up of people who grew up together.
In these areas, the worldview of our people group is very rigid and binary. People are either good or bad, trustworthy or not. If you grew up with them or somehow otherwise know in great detail that they come from a “good” and trustworthy extended family, you can trust them. Otherwise, you can never trust them. Trustworthiness is something you either have or don’t have. It’s not understood as something that can be granted or lost in degrees or something that can be incrementally built. At least this is how most locals think and behave in their day-to-day lives.
However, this is where a local proverb has proved so incredibly helpful. “Travel and business are a gold appraisal tool.” Paraphrased, this means “Through travel and business a person’s character is revealed.” In this proverb, we see the ancestral wisdom of our people saying you can come to trust someone by going on a long trip with them or by going into business with them. When we started using this proverb in response to a local believer insisting he’d never trust another local believer, the conversations noticeably changed.
Before, it was like we hit a wall, a locked gate. But when we used this proverb by way of appeal, it was like we were somehow smuggled in behind the defenses – and were then able to turn the conversation to how the Bible speaks of trustworthiness. As the local believer then scratched their chin and admitted, “We do say that, don’t we?” we could tell them that the Bible’s questions for ‘trustworthy or not’ sound like, “Does someone confess the gospel? Does their life exhibit the fruit of the Spirit? Are they a member of a healthy church?” In this way, this local proverb became our Trojan Horse by which we smuggled in biblical categories that were otherwise being rejected out of hand. Today, a local church exists of believers who did not grow up together – yet who have come to trust one another (at least the core members, anyway).
This miracle is, of course, a work of the Spirit. And yet the Spirit uses means. And one of the surprising means that he used was a proverb that our local friends knew and believed, but which they were mostly forgetting about in favor of a more prominent idea. We had somehow stumbled on a place of inconsistency in the local culture where one area of inherited wisdom contradicted another area of inherited wisdom. When in response to “Don’t trust anyone you didn’t grow up with,” we countered with “Travel and business builds trust,” this seemed to produce a worldview short-circuit of sorts. These crossed wires created just enough space to shift the conversation into the creation of new, biblical categories.
It doesn’t always work, of course. Cultural beliefs and habits go deep, even if you’ve got some punchy proverbs on your side. But for me, this story illustrates the potential of this kind of work. We’ve not really ever laid out an organized biblical theology of trust and trustworthiness for local believers. We’ve only made very initial attempts to do this, somehow gaining far more ground from this lone proverb and brief references to Scripture than we ever thought we could. Imagine what might result if we were to lay out for local believers, on the one hand, a detailed picture of what their culture believes about trust; and then on the other hand, the big picture of what the Bible has to say. Then after comparing and contrasting, thanking God for the overlap and lamenting the deficiencies, we break it all down into new, biblically-faithful proverbs that they can carry with them and use in their daily lives.
All of this reminds me of Paul in Acts 17 and Titus 1. In both places, he uses the pagan poet Epimenides of Crete to illustrate and create space for his difficult biblical message. The line “For we are indeed his offspring” is used to prepare Paul’s Athenian audience for his point that God is not an idol, but a living being who demands repentance. And “Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons” is used to strengthen Titus’ hand in shutting down all the insubordinate, empty, and deceitful talk going on among the churches in Crete. Some Areopagites would be helped to hear Paul because he appealed to a poet they respected from a nearby nation. And hopefully, some Cretans might likewise hear Paul/Titus referencing the same man, their native poet, and stop being such blockheads.
Even Jesus appeals to local oral tradition when it agrees with and supports his teaching. “For here the saying holds true, ‘One sows and another reaps.’ I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor. Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor.” (John 4:37-38)
The takeaway from all of this is that there will often be some local wisdom that is on our side – sayings or proverbs or poets that can function as Trojan horses for gospel servants who hope to get in behind the defenses and gain a hearing for biblical truth. We have found proverbs like “travel and business” to be immensely helpful in gaining a hearing for biblical truth. Perhaps even deeper and more thorough work in these directions could yield even more encouraging fruit.
Beware missionaries wielding proverbs? Well, if you are a servant of the enemy, then yes. Whether proverbs, poets, or otherwise, it seems that God has planted Trojan horses like these that can get through even the thickest of walls.
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Tonight I was enjoying some fish and chips at a downtown Indianapolis plaza while recovering from a long day of support-raising training. Suddenly, I found myself recruited by strangers to join a team for the Taylor Swift trivia competition about to begin in the plaza. I warned my three enthusiastic new friends that I was one of the worst people they could possibly find for knowing pop music trivia. When it comes to superstars like Taylor Swift, I have very much been living under a rock. Or, as my Central Asian friends say, sleeping in the ear of a bull. And I am okay with that. There are Central Asian idioms to learn, after all.
Alas, the Swifties recruited me anyway. Funnily enough, I did help them get the answer right to the first song Swift ever learned on her guitar. But this was only because anyone who was a teenager beginning to learn the guitar in the 2000s was bound to quickly learn Kiss Me by Sixpence None the Richer. It was easy, catchy, and made you sound much better than you were. This deduction shocked us all by actually being correct and left my much younger teammates (who had been stumped by the question) thoroughly impressed. I also helped them spell the name of Zayn Malik, not because I know anything about him as an artist, but simply because I’ve had Muslim friends named Zayn or Malik. You really never know when two utterly isolated fields of knowledge are going to suddenly intersect.
Anyway, back to Central Asia. “Have you been sleeping in the ear of a bull?” is the kind of idiom someone would throw out when a person is ignorant of something that has become common knowledge to seemingly everyone else. In English, we would say things like “Where have you been?” or “How could you not know that?” or “Have you been living under a rock?” Imagine someone in the US not knowing that America is facing the slow-motion train wreck of Trump vs. Biden 2.0, for example.
My unbelieving Central Asian friends might use this saying when they’re insisting that it’s really the US who controls groups like ISIS as part of its grand puppet master strategy for the Middle East. And my believing local friends might use it when foreign Christians reveal that we don’t really understand what Jesus is talking about with the whole wineskins thing. Their common experience with using goat skins for liquids that ferment makes Jesus’ parable about the kingdom needing new goatskins super straightforward, something everyone surely knows – unless they’ve been asleep under a rock, that is, or in the ear of a bull.
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These two local sayings are used interchangeably for the same kinds of situations. Locals might proclaim one, or both of them, when they are expressing delight at seeing someone dear to them, or when they see a cute child. They might also use them as a very warm affirmative to a request, such as if you ask them if they would mind helping you understand how to pay your water bill. And when you see your mother’s third cousin’s teacher walking through the bazaar and you engage in the expected blast of honorable words to “outdo the other in showing honor,” these phrases will also then undoubtedly come out.
The first one about being your sacrifice is dramatic, for sure, but understandable. The person is using this hyperbolic saying to proclaim that they would (hypothetically) do anything for you, even die for you. There are still animal sacrifices in our Islamic context, mainly connected to religious feasts. Some would understand them as securing some kind of forgiveness of sin, but most see it simply as a religious tradition meant to bring joy to the family (through feasting on the meat) and care for the poor (since a portion of the sacrificed meat must be given away to the less fortunate). Unlike Christians in the West, every local has experience with what an animal sacrifice actually looks, feels, and smells like. They’ve seen their grandpa or uncle ritually slit the cow or sheep’s throat and seen its blood spill out all over the courtyard tiles. Many have also ceremonially stepped over the blood as it drains away in the street gutters. So even though they don’t mean it literally when they say they’ll be your sacrifice, it’s still a saying that can carry some real weight, depending on how it’s being used.
The second saying about being your alcohol waiter is a bit more mysterious. How did this come to be such a common and respectful saying in an Islamic context where alcohol is supposed to be forbidden? First, alcohol was definitely around over the centuries (and still is today) even if it’s supposed to be off-limits for good Muslims. A historic presence of Jews and ethnic Christians meant that Muslims could, and did, often buy alcohol from these communities. Second, quite the drinking culture emerged among the men during the second half of the twentieth century when our region was heavily influenced by secularism and modernity. Third, there’s always been areas of uneasy tension between the older indigenous culture of our people and certain Islamic laws and customs. Alcohol seems to be an area where some locals view the mainstream Islamic policy of teetotaling as a foreign imposition at odds with the traditional freedoms of their people.
But how did offering to be someone’s alcohol waiter come to be a proclamation of respect, service, and affection? This is quite the mystery, both to me and to my local friends. Regardless, I have seen old Muslim women who would never drink nor condone anyone else doing so saying this to my children as they kiss their cheeks. The resulting irony is hard to miss. A Muslim grandma is offering to be the alcohol waiter for an underaged child whose family is with a Christian missions organization with a no-alcohol policy – yet everyone is smiling and feels valued and respected. Language is such a strange thing sometimes.
All of this means that if Chick-Fil-A ever opens a branch in our area, their workers will have quite the range of local equivalents for their required response of “my pleasure.” And some of most polite among these would be, “I will be your sacrifice” and “I will be your alcohol waiter.”
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Every trade has certain areas of knowledge that a respectable worker in that trade should be able to teach on the spot. These areas of knowledge would be the fundamentals of that kind of work, the basic frameworks, principles, and formulas that lead to good work being done in that field. Imagine an electrician being unable to easily respond to a question about how electricity works, or a doctor who’s not able to provide an overview of the body’s main systems. We rightly expect that professionals should be able to respond to impromptu questions about the core of their respective fields – and that they would even be able to do this in their sleep. If they can’t, we are right to question the quality of their work.
Three things every church planting missionary should be able to teach on the spot are 1) What is the gospel?, 2) What is a true believer, and 3) What is a healthy church?
If a missionary is not able to provide a biblical summary on the spot for each of these fundamental questions, then how are the locals – with the added difficulties of different language, culture, and background religion – ever going to grasp these concepts as clearly as they need to? I’m not arguing against long sermon series, bible studies, books, or seminars on each of these topics. These are absolutely needed. Mainstream missiology might discount the importance of this kind of deep teaching, but it will continue to be essential for effective frontier church planting, just as it’s always been in the past.
We reformed-healthy-church types, however, sometimes provide the theological treatise and forget to equip our teams and disciples with the practical tools needed to both remember and then faithfully summarize that truth with anyone, anywhere, and at any time. We might differ with missionaries who espouse movement methodology, but they have understood one principle extremely well – if you can’t put your ecclesiology on a napkin, your disciples are highly unlikely to be able to remember it and pass it on to others.
Over the years, here are the three basic frameworks that I’ve used to summarize the Bible’s teaching on 1) What is the gospel?, 2) What is a true believer? And 3) What is a healthy church? All of these are borrowed from others, sometimes with a slight reworking here or there.
First, what is the gospel? Here, I’ve long used the four word summary of God, Man, Christ, Response to summarize the heart of the good news.
God is the holy and good creator. Man, created good, rebelled and is now cursed with death and hell. Christ is the God-become-man who was the perfect sacrifice for our sins on the cross and who rose from the dead, conquering death, and who now reigns forever. Anyone who responds to this message with repentance for their sins and faith in Jesus will be saved now and for all eternity. I’ve written previously on how we’ve used this 4-word framework as a regular part of our church plant’s services, with encouraging results.
Second, what is a true believer? Here I’ve used a simple two-point framework. A true believer is someone who 1) confesses the gospel message and their faith in it, and 2) shows evidence in their life of the new birth.
A true believer must confess with his mouth that Christ is Lord (Rom 10:9). So, if someone tells me they believe the gospel, but they can’t tell me what the gospel is (even in the basic spiritual language of baby believers), then I’m not ready to say true faith is present. An accurate verbal confession must be present, though verbal confession is not enough. They must also believe it in their heart. And since we can’t see their heart, we must look for clear evidence of the new birth, evidence of the Holy Spirit’s transforming work in their life (The book of 1st John is a great place to explore this). When both are present, even in seed or sapling form, then I’m ready to affirm that person’s faith and to start discussing baptism.
Third, what is a healthy church? Here, I’ve leaned heavily on the IMB’s 12 characteristics of a healthy church framework, which itself seems to have leaned on the 9 Marks framework. The problem is it’s very hard to remember 12 characteristics. So, as a new team leader a number of years ago I worked to try and find an acronym that would be unique/absurd enough to remember. The best I could do was “5 ships get a mop.” The five ships are Discipleship, Worship, Leadership, Membership, Fellowship. And GET A MOP stands for Giving, Evangelism, Teaching/Preaching, Accountability/Discipline, Mission, Ordinances, and Prayer.
This framework for remembering the characteristics of a healthy church is the most cumbersome of the three, but I have seen teams effectively trained in it and able to then reproduce it with others. This involved a good long season of running through this framework in each team meeting, until the team members were sick of it – which meant they now knew it well enough to write in on a napkin when their local friend asked them what a church was supposed to be like. What I’ve not done yet for this framework is find a way to make it memorable not just in English, but in our local language.
Each of these frameworks is a practical tool for ministry. If I’m interacting with a Muslim or with a local who thinks the gospel is “do more good than bad,” then I can rely on the four words gospel summary in that conversation with them. If a local thinks he is a Christian, but has merely made a shift of mental and emotional allegiance because he hates Islam, I can use the two points of the true believer framework to help him see he’s not yet a true Christian. If I’m sitting down with a first-generation local pastor who has never seen a healthy church, I can bring up the 12 characteristics of a healthy church and ask him how he envisions applying the Bible’s vision for the local church in his own congregation.
But they’re not just convenient tools. They are trustworthy summaries of the rich biblical teaching on each of these topics, which believers should be hearing taught in the normal life of the church. In this way, they can serve local believers in their struggle for the truth just like that peculiar hand gesture of the ancient church served them – pointer finger and middle finger extended to acknowledge the two natures of Christ, thumb, ring, and pinky finger touching to confess the Trinity (see photo above). We should learn from the ancient church that truths that are constantly under attack and at risk of misunderstanding or twisting call for faithful, reproducible ways of holding onto them.
These tools themselves are meant to serve the saints so that they are better equipped to remember and share the inspired Word of God. That means these tools are not themselves the main thing, but rather merely a pointer to the main thing. Therefore, we shouldn’t hold too rigidly to any of these tools or frameworks. The point is, like a good tradesman, to be able to remember and give a helpful answer on the spot for the core areas of knowledge in your field. These three frameworks, or other solid ones that you might come up with, serve to do that for the particular labor of church planters and missionaries – a field where eternity itself is at stake.
These kinds of tools also equip us to serve all believers, regardless of their literacy level. Many of the unreached and unengaged people groups of the world – not to mention many of the poor and working class in the West – are primarily oral in their abilities and preferences. Or they’re only functionally literate, meaning they can read and write when needed, but they don’t choose to do so for pleasure. When we train believers in memorable oral frameworks, we equip all the saints, regardless of their literacy level.
Test yourself. Could you, right now, summarize for a friend the message of the gospel? The difference between a true Christian and a false one? Those elements that characterize a healthy church? If you find yourself unsure of your ability to do this, consider memorizing one of these frameworks, or other good equivalents. Doing so will not only lead to greater clarity in your own mind, but also equip you to lead others also into a better understanding of these fundamental truths.
All Christians should desire fluency in these topics. But missionaries especially need to be “skilled master-builders” when it comes to the gospel, conversion, and the local church (1 Cor 3:10). After all, if they do not have mastery in these central truths, they will not be able to entrust them to local believers. We can guard the gospel and right doctrine by making sure those we send, those we train, and we ourselves know these three things deeply – deep enough to be able to talk about them in our sleep.
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This local proverb is roughly the equivalent of “Let bygones be bygones” and perhaps “Don’t beat a dead horse.” Its main point is that it’s foolish to bring up problems from the past that have already been addressed. To do so is a great way to stir up trouble unnecessarily.
Why does the proverb use the imagery of going after a hat? On this front, I’m not completely sure. It may be referring to the impossibility of wearing the traditional headgear the exact same way as yesterday, since this involves a skull cap with a scarf wrapped into a turban around it. Or it may simply mean that if you lost your hat, it’s not worth investing much to find it. Just move on and get another one. I can say that wearing hats was until recently very important in local culture when it came to honor and respectability. And not just locally. When you look at photos from the first half of the 20th century, even in the West, almost everyone is wearing hats.
The disappearance of hats or turbans as an expected part of respectable daily clothing is something I’ve never heard discussed. But something clearly happened. For hundreds and hundreds of years almost everyone wears them everyday. Then somewhere in the mid 20th century, they stop. Maybe the increasing availability of indoor plumbing meant that hair was able to be made presentable much more easily, and therefore hats were no longer as necessary? In this theory, styled hair is the new hat. Or, perhaps the disappearance of hats is a reflection of the global workforce and even domestic life moving more and more indoors and out of the sun. It’s one of the great unsolved mysteries of history, and something that a time traveler from a hundred years ago would find most peculiar about our present time.
Anyway, back to the meaning of the proverb. Bringing up problems from the past that have already been covered or resolved is a kind of destruction. Solomon agrees, “Whoever covers an offense seeks love, but he who repeats a matter separates close friends” (Prov 17:9). This is the kind of foolishness or malice that is powerful enough to ruin even close friendships.
There is a great deal of wisdom required in knowing when to cover an offense, and when it’s necessary to explicitly address the sin and pursue clear apologies and forgiveness. But either way, after we have decided to cover it in love or have had the reconciliation conversation, then wisdom would have us to truly release it – and no longer go after yesterday’s hat.
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Arguing with your wife is like spitting straight up into the air.
Regional Oral Tradition
This is a new proverb I’ve just learned, used among a sister people group. What’s true of making connections to remember new vocabulary is also true of learning proverbs – the more absurd, the easier to remember. This proverb uses a thoughtless and self-defeating action – spitting directly up into the air – to highlight the foolishness of much arguing within marriage.
When you spit straight up, it’s going to come back down, right onto your face. Likewise, when you dig in and keep pushing and prodding in order to win that argument with your spouse, you might be technically “winning.” But because of the nature of marriage, the relational oneness you share with your spouse, you are in fact doing harm, both to them and also to yourself. We have an English saying similar to this one, “like spitting into the wind,” that also communicates the futility and stupidity of a given action – although I’ve never heard it applied to marital conflict.
The Scriptures also present the importance of pursuing peace in the marriage relationship. “A continual dripping on a rainy day and a quarrelsome wife are alike” (Prov 27:15). “Likewise, husbands, live with your wives in an understanding way…” (1 Pet 3:7). And, “He who loves his wife loves himself” (Eph 5:28). What does this practically look like? “Let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger” (James 1:19).
So, heed the wisdom of generations of Central Asian nomads past, and more importantly, the wisdom of God’s word. Don’t spit directly up into the air, and don’t argue with your spouse. Your spouse (and your face) will thank you.
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This Central Asian proverb speaks to the danger of friends going into debt with one another. Borrow money from your friend, this wisdom claims, and risk the love between you getting cut up.
I’ve experienced the great strain that friendships can come under when money I’ve loaned out to friends in Central Asia isn’t returned or acknowledged in an honorable way. Even though our family tried to be very cautious in loaning out money, it is still an expected practice in a patron-client society where the foreigners are often much wealthier than the locals. Some foreigners take a “never loan money” approach to the culture. But over the years we’ve developed more of a practice of conservatively lending money the first time, and then letting that experience determine if the door is still open or not for future requests. For those who repay their debts, this can greatly increase the trust in the relationship. And it is a wonderful thing to have friends you know you can trust with money, especially between believers who must function as a new household for one another. For those who don’t repay, we know not to extend the same trust in the future, at least when it comes to money. The money may be lost, but wisdom in the relationship is gained. But even with this general approach, we tried to spare our dearest friendships this debt/trust test whenever possible. It’s stunning how money can so quickly come to divide people.
In general, Central Asians are much more comfortable than Westerners with having money be a part of their close relationships. So much so that many feel they can’t honorably say no to a friend asking for a loan. So it’s curious that this proverb also exists in the culture, standing as a wise warning, even if many will struggle to feel they are free to heed its advice.
Some local believers are seeking to change this culture. Harry* once told me his response to requests for loans. “I’m honored that you would ask me this, my respected brother. But I value your friendship so much that I dare not risk it by getting money involved.” This kind of response takes an action viewed as shameful – saying no to a loan – but explains it by appealing to the value of the relationship, something very honorable and close to the heart of the culture. To me, this seems like a very wise way to say no. The goal is to communicate that my refusal is not a rejection of our relationship, but rather a statement of just how important it is to me. So important, I would protect us from the money that might cut our bonds of friendship.
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Entrusted to the Dirt 
