Category: Karli Von Herbulis

Riding the Tides of Cross-cultural Life

Rwanda, the country I’ve called home for the last ten years, is known as the “land of a thousand hills.” It’s become common amongst my expat friends to extend the name to fit our experience: “the land of a thousand hills and a thousand emotions.” It often seems that the stunning highs and paralyzing lows of this life echo the landscape around us, sometimes even in the course of a day. The tide-like quality of frustration and favor can disorient even the most steadfast amongst us.

This experience is far from unique. Life is unpredictable and dramatic in its range; life in Christ can make that spectrum even more pronounced. The life of following Christ to serve in a culture that isn’t your own? Buckle up, buttercup. 

In my work as a spiritual director, I am always on the lookout for metaphors that help me (and my directees) give language to the ways we relate to God and one another. A few years ago, I was stopped in my tracks by a beautiful poem on Instagram, and it has called me back periodically ever since:

Until I Thought of Myself as the Sea

“I used to separate good days from bad until
I thought of myself as an ocean. I used to
split times I felt strong from when I felt weak
until I imagined myself as the sea. Calm and
rocky, wild and soft, still and powerful and vast
and more than any one thing. In the ocean it’s
hard to divorce one mood from another, one wave
from the next. Now on my worst days, I think
of how good life is too, how I can still greet joy
while swimming through grief. How fragile
strength feels. How I’m not any one thing in any
one moment in any one day. I’m all of it and
All of it is me.”

-Hannah Rosenberg, Instagram Post

While not expressly Christian, Hannah’s words invite the reader into a sacred level of introspection and awareness through the metaphor of the sea. We can ask ourselves: Do I see myself this way? Do I afford myself this grace? Do I allow for the coming and going of the tides, as the Lord sees fit? Can life contain all of this, at once, and still be blessed?

Rosenberg’s poem has invited me to allow space for all of this to be a part of the life I’ve been called to: good days and bad days, greeting joy while swimming through grief. Days when I feel strong and days when I feel weak. Days when I feel like I am really making a difference for the Kingdom and days when I can barely get out of bed. Calm, rocky, wild, soft. When I think of myself as the sea, I can be all of these things, I can experience them fully, and they can all be sacred. 

A few weeks ago, I was once again left breathless by a short poem I found on Threads — and reading the two together leaves me deeply encouraged. 

The caption reads: I don’t name the ocean anymore. I just know the water is holy.

“My relationship with God
Is the tide
High. Then low.
Sometimes a dolphin shows up
Sometimes a shark
And yet — the water is always holy.”

-John Roedel on Threads

I’ll be vulnerable here: these days, I feel like I’m swimming in waters with sharks and dolphins. It can sometimes be difficult to tell which is which. One distracts me from the other. Joy and sorrow, grief and gratitude, all swirling about in water that sometimes feels murky and other times feels crystal clear. Is the water always holy? On my best, most steady days, I think so. On other days, I am disoriented and overwhelmed by it all. 

But this language, of sea and tides and dolphins and sharks and swimming through the contradictions, has become very dear to me. 

When I feel lost in a wave of culture stress and lack of clarity in my calling and career trajectory, I can take a moment and remember that this is but a wave, and it will recede. 

When a prayer is finally answered in a way that feels nothing short of miraculous, I can gaze in awe at this “dolphin” and praise what the Lord has done. I can embrace the playfulness and relish this fleeting gift.

When I feel attacks coming from all sides, and I know the enemy is seeking to destroy the good the Lord is doing, I can name the shark and punch it in the nose. (And ask others to help me!) 

When I find myself in a season that seems too good, too sweet, too blessed to last, I can take some time to float on my back and enjoy it all before the next wave comes in and knocks me off balance. 

How we experience God, how we move through this cross-cultural life, is rarely static or predictable. But, as John Roedel says, the water is always holy. Our Lord is working all things for our good. 

So friend, I invite you: take some time this week to pray about your life through this lens. Ask the Lord to teach you how to navigate the tides you are facing. Ask Him to show you the dolphins and sharks.

Spend some time floating on your back in the graces and gifts you find present in this season. And if the water feels treacherous and you can’t find the shore, remember: the tide will eventually change, and the Lord is always with you. 

When in Doubt, Follow the Fruit

The life of a global worker comes with an unending stream of internal (and sometimes external) questions. Every aspect of our lives bears an immense amount of weight; it often seems that nothing is trivial. These questions, and the decisions that follow them, can wear even the strongest believers down over time.

Is it culture?
Is it sin?
Can I follow this leader?
Should we leave?
Is this still the work I’m called to?
Where should our kids go to school?
Should we give this person money?
Do I need to address this situation, or is it fine?
Is this counsel I’m receiving wise?
Can I say this on social media?
Where do you want us, Lord?

How are we to discern all these things, when often there isn’t a clear right or wrong option? How do we know which way to turn, or who to follow, when it’s just not as black and white as we’d like it to be?

A few years ago, when struggling in the midst of a challenging interpersonal situation, I was given this advice: when discerning something tricky, look for the fruit of the Spirit, and follow it. 

This advice has held me through unthinkable scenarios. 

When Jesus told the disciples that he was leaving, they were distraught. How were they to know where to go, how to live, what their tasks should be? Jesus consoled them, telling them not to be afraid or dismayed, because he was sending someone even greater: the Holy Spirit. Jesus told the disciples that this was actually better for them than being with him, because the Spirit was always with them, no matter the circumstance. 

Galatians 5:25 tells us that “The fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control.” These principles can guide us in our discernment when we find ourselves in areas of grey. Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom (2 Corinthians 3:17). When we are in a situation we don’t understand, faced with a decision that seems impossible to discern, or wondering where on earth we are to go next (sometimes literally!), we can remember that the Spirit is with us, guiding us along the way.

When we wonder if a person is trustworthy, or if a leader is worth following, we look for the fruit of the Spirit. Do we see love, joy, patience? Is there peace in this? Do they show kindness and faithfulness? Are their words and works and way of living bearing good fruit for the Kingdom?

When we consider a change in field or assignment, we can ask the Lord to show us what fruit this will bear in us. Will we grow in our gentleness or self-control? Will this bring peace to our family? Is there joy here? If we shift, are there people bearing fruit in this new space that we can work with?

When we consider if something is a cultural difference or a sin issue, we can ask ourselves: Is there goodness and kindness here? Is this loving—even if in a way that I don’t recognize naturally? Do I have peace? Do others around this person have peace?

Of course, our hearts can be deceiving. Personal affinity can feel a lot like peace if not fully surrendered to the Lord and confirmed by wise counsel. Fun and excitement and intensity can feel a lot like joy, especially if your personality thrives on those things. Staying put can be confused for faithfulness if you’re a change-averse or conflict-averse person. Allowing someone to continue to do their job poorly, or to continue in a sinful pattern, can masquerade as love and patience if you aren’t careful. Misplaced generosity looks and feels a lot like goodness until you look further down the line. 

The deeper truth here is this: learning to recognize the fruit of the Spirit requires pausing, and it requires practice. 

Pausing allows us to truly reflect on what we are seeing and feeling, ask the Lord for wisdom, and be sensitive to what we see. We have to stop moving and talking and allow Him to speak! Too often, we are moving so quickly that we fail to see the signs the Lord might be giving us to help us navigate our lives. Regular rhythms of prayer and reflection, ideally that include listening and silence, help mitigate this penchant for productivity and speed. 

Practice allows us to more clearly recognize the movement of the Spirit. This might be in community, with trusted mentors or even teammates, as we seek the will of the Lord together. This might simply be in partnership with God, asking Him to highlight the Spirit’s movement to you and grow your discernment like a muscle. Just as a skilled hiker can tell the difference between poisonous mushrooms and nutritious ones, over time and with much prayer we can learn to recognize the fruit of the Spirit as gifts from the Lord for our discernment. 

Friends, as we move through this life abroad, remember that the Lord did not leave us to navigate all of our decisions alone. He has given us a helper, and that helper is recognizable through these fruits: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. May you follow hard after these things—and find the consolation of the Spirit waiting for you there.

Learning to Mark the Seasons with the Church Calendar

Moving abroad is disorienting for many reasons, not least because holidays, traditions, and seasons often look completely different than they do back home, or are ignored entirely. Especially if you’re used to distinct seasons but now live in a place without them (or vice versa), that sense of loss can feel sharper than expected. 

I’ve become accustomed to the sight of palm trees wrapped in Christmas lights. Black Santa feels more familiar to my children than any grey-haired American version they would’ve encountered in their passport country. But what about autumn, with her crisp mornings and reminder to release what’s no longer needed? Or spring, with her buds of new growth and call to embrace the sunshine after months of hibernation? Depending on where you are in the world, even the predictable lengthening and shortening of days through the year might be absent, rendering each month, each “season,” virtually indistinguishable from the next. 

This is bigger than pining for a Pumpkin Spice Latte or a Reese’s Heart (the best shape), though those things are also extremely valid! The loss of the seasons, rhythms, and dates that used to anchor our lives is truly grief-inducing. Days and celebrations that once marked our time and gave shape to our lives can vanish or morph beyond recognition. This can stir up a mix of emotions, so first let me  give you permission to feel all of them — sadness, confusion, nostalgia, even relief. They’re valid.

Early in my time abroad, I began leaning into the church calendar, or liturgical year, as a way to create new rhythms of sacred time within my family — something we could carry with us, wherever we lived. I was fascinated by how the liturgical year could draw us into a rhythm of fasting and feasting, reflection and rejoicing, all centered around the story of Christ’s life. It gave me a way to orient my heart toward the seasons of God’s story instead of the rhythms of culture. The perpetual summer of East Africa was slowly wearing me down, but the power and presence of the liturgical year gave me hope. 

If you’re unfamiliar with the church calendar, you’re in good company. I was raised in a Southern Baptist church, which made this pretty foreign to me at the start. The church year, or liturgical year, is a year-long cycle of seasons that liturgical churches observe formally, but is available to anyone. You might recognize some of the more familiar parts of the calendar like Advent and Lent, but it also includes others like Pentecost, Eastertide, Ordinary Time, and even the 12 Days of Christmas. Together, these seasons walk the church through the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus each year, inviting us to participate in rhythms of waiting, repentance, celebration, and mission.

As I recognized my disorientation with traditional holidays in my host culture, the church calendar became an anchor for me as I created a home for our family. It offered a structure for time that didn’t depend on national holidays or weather or what kitschy goodies I could find at the Target Dollar Spot. 

I channeled my grief into absorbing as much information as I could about the church calendar and coming up with creative ways to observe it within our home. Over the years, our family has developed our own traditions: lighting Advent candles, marking Ash Wednesday and Palm Sunday, learning about saints whose lives inspire us, and even — to our daughter Hallelujah’s great delight — joking that we can’t say her name during Lent!

Most importantly, the church calendar has become a way to be rooted in the greater story of Jesus, a way to orient our lives around God’s kingdom no matter where we are in the world. We may not always find a church celebrating every feast or fast, but we can still mark it in our hearts and homes.

For our family, following the liturgical year has become a gentle act of resistance, a way to be in the world but not of it. It reminds us that our citizenship isn’t ultimately American, Rwandan, or anything else, but heavenly. The calendar helps us keep time by God’s rhythm: a rhythm that transcends borders, cultures, and time zones. As global workers, might just be one of the most grounding gifts we can receive.

If this idea feels new to you, or you’re curious about how to begin, here are a few gentle ways to start incorporating the church calendar into your rhythm of life, especially as Advent season approaches:

  • Notice the seasons. Simply start paying attention to where the global church is in the story. When Advent begins, when Lent begins, when Easter or Pentecost arrive, find a way to acknowledge it. Awareness alone begins to shape us. You can get a beautiful printable calendar from Little Way Chapel here.
  • Mark the moment. Light a candle. Change the color of a tablecloth or a vase of flowers to match the season (purple for Advent and Lent, white for Easter, green for Ordinary Time). Small visual cues help our souls remember the story we’re living in.
  • Create family rituals. This could be as simple as reading a short Advent devotion around dinner (there are lots of free resources available around the web), writing prayers of gratitude during Eastertide, or taking a short walk on Ash Wednesday to reflect on your humanity and dependence on God. There is so much freedom here! Create something beautiful and unique for you and your context.
  • Find your community rhythm. If your local church doesn’t follow the liturgical calendar, that’s okay. Consider connecting with online communities or friends who do. Share reflections, prayers, or even photos as reminders that you’re keeping sacred time together, across oceans.

You don’t have to overhaul your entire year to begin. Let this be a gift as you make your home overseas, not a reason to be overwhelmed. Just take one step toward living more intentionally in God’s story—one candle, one prayer, one small pause at a time. I pray the liturgical calendar is a blessing to your home, as it has been to mine. May it anchor you in love and presence, no matter where you find yourself in this season.

When Life Feels Like a Kudzu Forest

I’ve spent the last week at CIT, a missionary training and debriefing center in rural North Carolina. Our family is attending a debriefing retreat, which, after nearly ten years on the field, has been very needed. 

There’s a short hiking trail that runs through the woods behind the retreat center, about half a mile long. Meandering at a slow, contemplative pace, it takes about thirty minutes to walk from one end to the other. The woods are pretty standard: a variety of trees and vines, some huge upturned stumps now and again, birdsong wafting through the canopy. It’s easy to tune out your surroundings and get lost in your thoughts, which is how I spent a recent afternoon. 

One part of the hike, though, stopped me in my tracks. I could hear a babbling brook not far from the trail, though I couldn’t see it, as there were vines overgrowing the area between me and where I assumed the creek to be. 

As I looked around for a path that might lead me to the water (I love finding water to sit and stare at while I think or meditate), I made a surprising discovery: I couldn’t tell where one tree ended and another began—honestly, I could barely tell the ground from the bushes—because everything was covered in kudzu vines. What should’ve been a biodiverse group of distinct plants became one giant blob of identical leaves, jutting up here and there, but leaving no hint as to what was underneath.

It was striking in its uniformity. If you take a moment to throw “kudzu” into a search engine, you’ll see what I mean. It makes a landscape look almost alien, like sculptures trying to burst up from underneath some suffocating layer of fabric. 

I wasn’t about to try to navigate through the mess down to a possible creek, so I turned back to the trail and headed on my way. But this starkly homogenous view in the middle of the forest stayed with me, inviting me to meditate further as I walked back toward our apartment.

Kudzu is invasive. It’s not supposed to be here, but it is, and it’s wildly out of control. Take a drive anywhere south of the Mason Dixon and you’ll see whole stretches of highways that look as if someone’s thrown a green blanket over them. The native plants are stifled and only the kudzu can be seen. 

In our group devotions the next morning, we talked about being perplexed but not in despair; struck down, but not destroyed (2 Cor. 4:8). My husband remarked that so much of this comes from relinquishing control to God and acknowledging that He knows the plans so much better than we do. “And, we only see in part,” I whispered under my breath.

Often, in our life as global workers, we reach points in our work where we have a very limited picture of what’s ahead. Honestly, there are whole seasons, years even, where we might live in that state. We can only see a bit ahead of us, and we have to trust God with the rest. 

Will the Lord bring new friends for my kids? For me?
Will we ever see a convert?
When will I ever get a visa?
Should I switch vocations? Organizations? Fields?
Is this something cultural, or should I address this between believers?
Will I need to leave the field to care for family?
Will my teenager be okay in our passport country without me for university?
Will we ever recover from this loss? This trauma? This season?
How can we ever afford to keep doing this work?
How can we ever afford to leave the field? 

When I was in the kudzu-covered forest, I couldn’t see anything that was going on below the surface. It all looked the same to me—covered in a veil of green leaves. But underneath, there is a whole variety of flora just out of my vision. I know it’s there. I just can’t see it. 

There’s a lot of things in my life that feel unclear and uncertain right now, like I’m just staring out into a forest of kudzu. I know that there’s stuff under there. Sometimes I can even hear the creek. But all I see is a disorienting blanket of green. 

And yet, God. The maker of streams and trees and, yes, kudzu. Who knows every blade of grass and every frog and every snake I was anxious about on that trail. He knows exactly what’s under all that kudzu. And He knows exactly how my story will play out. I’m so grateful.

Does this knowledge make navigating the forest of my life abroad any easier? Sure doesn’t. But we can take heart knowing the Lord is with us. 

If you find yourself in your own kudzu forest season, here are a few things to remember:

  • The Lord is the maker of the forest—and the author of your story. He knows every step in your journey, every path you’ll take (Psalm 139), every person you’ll meet along the way. None of it is a surprise to Him.
  • The Lord gives wisdom when we ask for it (James 1:5). Sometimes that comes in big chunks of a map, and other times it’s just a half step in front of us. But He is with us, and He knows the way. 
  • Ours is a God of peace, and not of confusion (1 Cor. 14:33). Notice that I didn’t say “clarity” there, because that’s not what Scripture promises! But we are promised His peace when we seek it.

When you find yourself a bit lost, or the future looks like one big homogenous blob of green, take heart, friend. We serve a God who sees beneath the mess with perfect clarity, carves a perfect path, and leads us every step. We only need to know His voice and follow after Him.