Just recently, I spent a week at the University of North Texas. My college ministry sent me to engage in spiritual conversations with students about Jesus!

One conversation that continues to challenge me actually was not with a student: on our last day of campus outreach, I spent an hour and a half talking to Ryan, a man who also subscribes to being a follower of Jesus.

I came across Ryan because he was also on campus with a small community of Christians, holding different signs designed to start conversation and dialogue about faith. Ryan's sign, in particular, read "The Bible Is 100% True: Yes or No?" Obviously, this caught my attention right away, and thus began our extremely long conversation.

What struck me the most was Ryan's reading and understanding of the Scriptures. While we seemed to have an agreement on the basic fundamentals of what every Christian believes (as we both consider ourselves followers of Jesus of Nazareth and everything He taught), we differed largely in our views of how exactly to read the Bible, particularly the Old Testament.

Ryan took every page of Scripture 100% literally at face value. He believes that not only every event in the Bible is historically true, but he also holds to the cosmology of the biblical authors: largely that the earth is flat, that the moon is a light in the sky, and other Ancient Near East ways of seeing the world.

This conversation was particularly difficult for me, as over the past few months I've really tried to explore how to read the Bible within its Ancient Near East context. When I asked Ryan how much he as explored even the original Hebrew the Old Testament was written in, he explained how had not done so much of that.

There is obviously an inherent frustration one can feel when having a discussion within (what should be) an area of common ground. So many times in my conversation with Ryan, I wanted to just tell him he was wrong, to share with him all that I have learned about how to read and engage with Ancient Jewish literature.

I wanted to correct him and guide him in how to approach reading as a cross-cultural experience, to give him a glace into my view of reading the Bible. But having to abruptly leave the conversation (our time for campus outreach that came had drawn to a close), I felt largely discouraged.

After taking time to reflect on the conversation I had, I decided that I was confidently conflicted: there was no "silver lining" to the conversation, rather there was some general good and convicting takeaways for me.

I learned the importance of listening and elevating others' voices. Now that I have actually had a conversation with someone who believes the Earth is flat, I have a very human context to operate with whenever I hear someone belittle or make a joke about "flat-earthers." I don't need to play along with making fun of a worldview just to fit in:

I have to recognize and humble myself to correct people and to speak words of love and grace.

This doesn't mean I am defending the worldview one holds: I am defending a human being who is made in the image of God, who has done nothing to deserve such ridicule and hurt. This is what all healthy dialogues within differing worldviews have to be: a recognition that we the forefront of our conversations are deconstructing ideas, not deconstructing peoples.

When we learn to have a mindset stemming from human-relatedness, we can begin to have conversations on the foundation of humility, the type that Jesus Himself had.