A Window Into My Soul: (and an apology to my friends)

Imagine: you are 9 years old, stepping off the plane, into a world where the rumble of conversation around you is not understandable, not translatable – sounds like babble to you! (There’s a reason it’s called the Tower of Babel!). Foreign smells waft past your noise – the stench of exhaust, of boiling peanuts, even at times urine. As you follow your family down the ramp into the baggage claim area, you find yourself being pressed up against on every side, with no regard to lines, or who got there first, or who’s smaller and about to get crushed!

It’s exciting and overwhelming all at once. Mom and Dad told you about this moment, but no one really knew what to expect. Before you know it, you’re being swept away into a world you never knew existed, sights and scenes that your 9-year-old American mind doesn’t quite know what to do with: children your own age knocking on your car window, pressing their noses up against the glass as they gaze inside to see who might be able to offer them a few coins to survive on. Dirt-caked faces, yet they grin from cheek to cheek, tinted teeth bearing witness to their malnutrition and neglect. But you don’t comprehend that. You only see someone who might become your friend tomorrow.

The heat is almost unbearable. It sticks to your skin, sucks up the oxygen so that it’s almost hard to breath, there’s so much moisture hanging thick in the air. You find yourself always sweating, even at night when your crawl under, no, not your blankets, just a nice cool, stiff bed sheet, with the fan on high blast, sending warm air your direction as the sounds of dogs barking, disco music pounding and roaring car engines becomes your lullaby.

Your life has been suddenly transformed before your eyes. You step on the plane from an ordered, clean environment, and step off into a world of chaos and disorder. From that moment on, life will never be the same.

This introduction to unfamiliarity is only the beginning. As you begin to interact with the world around you, you realize that you need the help of translators – and your parents! The smells, the food, the sounds – everything is new to your senses. It will take time to adjust to this new world.

As life on the mission field progresses, it is characterized by picking up and moving every couple years, by making and leaving friends every year. The anticipation of the summer is not ease of vacation and fun, but who you have to say goodbye to. New kids in class are the norm, and most of the time the question is “what mission are you with?” and whether they moved up from a rural school and are boarding or if they are one of the privileged few who actually get to live with their parents. On Sundays, your interact are with those whose homes range from tin shacks to mansions with marble floors. Not one person you interact with is alike. When you “do ministry” at the national schools, you find yourself saying to the kids, “Please, I don’t want to give you my autograph – I just have white skin, but I’m no different than you are.”

When you go on furlough, you find yourself repeating, “No, I don’t live in a hut, and yes, I know what television is.” When you step off the plane on American soil, you find yourself wishing you didn’t have white skin and an American passport, because you feel different than those around you, but everyone thinks you are just like them. A Jr. Whopper from Burger King is a delicacy, and silent nights an unfamiliarity.

People used to ask me, what feels more like home to you: the Philippines or the US? My response commonly was “Well, if home is what is familiar to you, then neither: unfamiliarity is familiar to me. So put me on a plane!”

My “norm” growing up was for everything around me to be different, unfamiliar. That experience has stayed with me as an adult. Every time something in my life gains some element of familiarity, whether it’s a relationship where I suddenly feel like there is less to learn about who someone is or what they are like, or a job that I’ve “mastered”, “to know” and “become accustomed to something" is a cue to me to move on and find something new to engage with.

Over the past two years, God has done much to help fight this restlessness that every MK, and really anyone who grew up moving around a lot, understands so well. And in the process, I’ve realized just how much it really does impact my relationships. Which means to all of you reading this on my blog, I’m talking about us!

I’m not used to being understood easily. I’m used to having to explain my world to the world around me, and vice versa. Seeing myself as someone that has something in common (actually a lot in common) with those around me makes me uncomfortable. I’m growing, but I think this one characteristic, this “familiarity with unfamiliarity” is probably one of the most insightful windows into my soul I can offer myself and others as I seek to grow in Christ and the person He desires me to be.

Perhaps I put myself on an extreme – that everyone has to do some explaining of themselves to others. But then my thinking so is just the symptom I’m referring to. I think I’m different than everyone else around me. Because growing up, I was different. And I didn’t get enough opportunity to bridge those gaps and say, wow, we have a lot more in common than I realized, because by the time I reached that point, that person would move on out of my life. Everything about life on the mission field is moving on, quick, grab this while you can because it might not be there tomorrow. There's no sense of long-term.

The funny thing about this is that I can still cross cultures and make a friend with just about anyone (if they’re friendly and kind and gracious enough to want to be friends with me!). I’m not intimidated by our differences – I thrive on it. "Tell me more about..." The world in my eyes is full of endless opprotunities to learn about experiences I've never had, but some other human being has. I ache to put my feet in their shoes and experience the world as they do.

But if there's one thing I’ve come to realize over the years, it's that you can’t appreciate your unity until you recognize your differences. Living overseas, I suppose, has a funny way of making you realize how unimportant those differences are at the end of day.

Am I being contradictory? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Maybe the experience of others around me is such that their learning process is acknowledging the differences, whereas mine is acknowledging the common ground.

So, to all my friends and loved ones: my apologies if I run from our similarities, if I put up my hand to our common grounds. I’m just not accustomed to being with those that understand me. Being different is familiar to me. Being the same is not. I’m growing, but...I have a long way to go before I will be able to accept the fact that my common ground with others is a good and desirable thing for me.