crossing cultures – A Life Overseas |

Cross-Cultural Skiing

My family arrived in the States for a six-month furlough in December. We eagerly awaited the “winter” weather, as my two boys barely have any memories of snow. But the winter weather seemed unpredictable and disappointing.

One day, I was talking with my dad about cross-country skiing. He loves skiing and has a whole collection of skis in our basement that he can use whenever the weather in Virginia allows. My nine-year-old son piped up, “Are you going to go cross-cultural skiing?”

I laughed. Apparently, my son really is a TCK. He is more familiar with the term “cross-cultural” than he is with the term “cross-country.” So I explained to him what his grandpa was actually talking about.

But the term my son used has stayed with me. We are, indeed, cross-cultural skiing.

Before furlough, we talked as a family about what we were looking forward to: Christmas presents, snow, grandparents (in that order). We talked about what was scary: a new school, different foods, leaving friends behind (“Will my friends forget me?” my son asked). Months of thought, preparation, and planning went into getting on the airplane to leave Indonesia.

But each time we furlough, I am surprised at what I forgot to anticipate— for myself and for my children.

This time around, before even landing in America, I realized my sons were not used to dry weather. Airplanes have dry air, as do winter months. My children, however, are accustomed to the humid air of tropical Indonesia. Licking his lips, over and over again, my eldest son’s face became red and painful.

Don’t lick your lips! I explained. But he is from the tropics. This air is an unfamiliar dry. My youngest son’s skin also became dry and itchy. “I don’t want that slimy stuff,” he screams as I run after him with lotion.

How do we help our children when the air itself is different from what we are used to? How do we help our families navigate switching between cultures on this journey of cross-cultural skiing?

Some parts of this life are beautiful. My children are bilingual and can switch between languages with ease. “Hi, my name is Luke. I’m bilingual,” my seven-year-old son says when he introduces himself. But on furlough, we must work hard to make sure Indonesian is not forgotten. We scroll through Netflix movies and shows to find only what is available in Indonesian. We switch our bedtime story routine to reading in Bahasa Indonesian (we use the free app Let’s Read Asia to access hundreds of books).

Sometimes this feels like a sacrifice, as the public library has an abundance of books in English that I would love to read. But I remember returning to the field after the last furlough; it took over a year for our son to start speaking smoothly in Indonesian again. We are working harder this time to help him remember, to keep him from forgetting.

I love how my children view life in America with excitement and wonder. They see things with new eyes, helping me also to enjoy the small things: squirrels, cardinals, blue jays, and blossoming daffodils provide backyard entertainment.

Other parts of this life are brutal. All the goodbyes in Indonesia, not knowing what things will be like when we return six months from now. Will our children’s friends remember them? Will our boys remember their friends? Will the ministry we started run smoothly without us, or will some crisis arise, plunging them into turmoil? Will there be floods, fires, deaths, or even eviction for our teammates and friends living in the slum community where we normally make our home?

How do we embrace the comfort of life in America, while at the same time guard our hearts to return once again to the field? And how do we help our children do the same? How can we hold both the good and the hard together? How can we enjoy our time here and also prepare our children to return to where life seems a lot more difficult?

One morning in February, my boys looked out the window at six in the morning and started screaming: “It’s snowing! It’s snowing!” And, indeed, the ground was covered in about two inches of snow. They jumped up and down, shouting their excitement for everyone in the house to hear.

And as soon as it was light, we finally got to build a snowman and go sledding. My dad pulled out his cross-country skis and enjoyed skiing down the same small hill that we were sledding on.

On perhaps his fourth trip down the hill, my dad noticed there was a log hidden under some snow. He tried to avoid hitting the log but lost his balance and took a dramatic fall. A trip to the ER revealed that he had not broken anything, though he was in pain for a few days.

This life of traveling between cultures can feel like that too. The joy and fun of reconnecting with relatives and old friends, eating food we’ve been missing, or simply wearing clothing that we don’t get to wear on the field can suddenly be replaced by feelings of grief and fear. We can feel like we have lost our bearings and might fall flat on our face. Our lips get chapped and our skin gets dry. We suddenly feel like foreigners in our own passport country.

As we struggle along on our journeys of navigating cultures, may we have grace for ourselves and for those on the journey with us – our teammates, our spouses, our children. May we have the grace to get back up when we fall down. The grace to keep trying. The grace to take risks and continue to choose to invest in relationships, to choose to love, even though goodbyes are just around the corner. May we embrace the good and the hard of this life as we go cross-cultural skiing together.

Missionary Job Description: Feel Awkward

An Introvert Moves to India

Shortly before we launched as missionaries to India, I was gifted a book. The title was something like Home at Last.

This book disturbed me.

In it, the (obviously extroverted) author writes we will be with people all the time in Heaven/The Earth Made New, and won’t that be wonderful?! After this statement, the author moves on to other beautiful theological musings and descriptions of Home. I skipped these and read again the people-all-the-time thing.

Oh no, I quietly panicked. I don’t want to be with people all the time. What if I’m not cut out for Heaven?!

Then we moved to India, where your arms seem to touch the arms of others nearly all the time, at least on the bus and sometimes even at your house. My neighbors, worried I would feel lonely or homesick, made sure never to leave me alone.

The good part of this is that I was also never hungry. And Indian food is some of the best I’ve ever tasted.

The difficult part is that sometimes I wanted everyone to take their curries and chapattis and palak panir and go visit someone else.

I actually like being around people. And I want lots of people to be in Heaven. But I need time to think about the meaning of life, you know? Otherwise, I feel like I stop understanding the world and my place in it. I lose track, becoming internally displaced. Sometimes I need a minute to think about Everything.

I’ve heard that’s called being an introvert.

Several times that first year, I locked my main door from the outside and sneaked back into my house from a side door, so people would think I was not at home.

Ahhh. Alone at Last.

Then my extroverted husband would bounce home like Tigger and wonder why I was locking out all the unreached people we had come to minister to. And I would wonder why I wasn’t more like him. And I would think to myself, “I can do this. I can be more like Joshua. I just need time to think about how to do that…”

Thinking, by myself, was my safe place. Language learning, making cultural mistakes, and being observed made me want to run and hide.

But when I went home and had my quiet moments, I found something in myself I hadn’t expected. The reason I was hiding was not always to analyze. Sometimes I hid for the sake of hiding.

Sometimes I hid because I was afraid.

That’s Awkward.

A friend of mine once said that the main job description of a missionary is to feel awkward.

You feel awkward in your host country. Then you go home and feel awkward, too.

I like knowing all the rules, especially social ones, and I like to go to sleep at night knowing that I didn’t offend anyone, and that I said what I meant to say, and was understood and didn’t talk too much or too little, and that nobody around me was ignored or suffered hurt feelings because of things I said or other people said. If I can’t sleep, I make a list of people I might have offended and pray over it and give it to God and sometimes follow up the next day.

Enter India. Instead of my neatly organized, slightly neurotic list-making, that first year I went to bed at night thinking about how to leave someone’s house.

I often visited a friend, and after a couple of hours would try to leave. She would ask me to stay longer. I would sit. A while later, I would try to leave again. She would ask me to stay longer. I would sit. After playing this up-down game for some time, I could tell my friend actually wanted me to leave. I wanted to leave, too. But she kept telling me to sit and stay, and I kept sitting and staying.

So, instead of analyzing the minute nuances of human interaction, I wondered how in the world people go home in India.

One awkward moment was tolerable. The problem was, I knew the awkwardness was going to be repeated multiple times daily. I was going to feel awkward. Often. And make other people feel awkward. And not be able to say anything to make it better, because all I could say was, “Nice to meet you, I have a brother who is older than me and a sister who is younger than me, do you want to drink chai?”

Honestly, it’s only because of my extroverted and goal-oriented husband that I kept going out the door. He would laugh with me over my faux pas, and they would become funny instead of tragic. Then he would remind me that making mistakes doesn’t kill you and that I have something to give the world. Something beyond just avoiding mistakes.

He would remind me that it’s worth the risk because maybe someone I felt awkward around might love Jesus someday. My shame might bring God glory.

Joshua and I argued a lot that first year, as he learned to be more introverted and I learned to be more extroverted. But I still thank him for his constant encouragement to exit our house. Because some of my favorite memories of my life are of my first year in India. They’re much more interesting than the memories I made just sitting and thinking. Funnier, too.

A Special Gift

But my introversion wasn’t all a stumbling block. It turned out to be a gift, too. I realized it was a gift after the 37th time that my friend Sai told me not to say danyavad.

I had lost sleep over this. Why in the world couldn’t I say thank you? What was wrong with being polite? What was I supposed to say instead?

It took multiple discussions (with people) and late-night analysis sessions (by myself) to finally understand why North Indians don’t say thank you to family members and close friends. The answer revealed something hidden deep within the culture, something that would help me understand why it’s so difficult for a Hindu to pick up their cross and follow Jesus. (I tell that entire story in my book, Hidden Song of the Himalayas.)

Using Your Gift

Introverts, don’t let your gift hold you back. I know some days it seems more prudent to wait until you speak the language or understand the culture before you really invest in others. But the only way to get to that place is through the forest of awkward not knowing. It’s like when you’re learning to drive, and you really want to slow down because everything is happening so fast, but sometimes it’s safer just to keep going.

Introverts, appreciate how God made you. Use your gift to do the uncomfortable work of cultural analysis that will make you a true insider. Let it be difficult. Let it hurt. Let it be awkward. It’s worth the cost.

At the same time, it’s okay to take a break. Just know that when you come away with Jesus on a mountain because you’re overwhelmed by the crowds, if they follow you there, He will provide. He will provide with what little you have, even if it’s just a few loaves of bread and a handful of tiny fish. Because He has compassion for you, and for the crowds, too.

While the awkward moments never completely subsided, I learned to decipher certain subtle linguistic and social cues in India. I learned to understand my friends, their language, and their unique perspectives. After seven years in India, I could finally picture myself in the Earth Made New, surrounded by people, arms touching as we stood together under the tree whose leaves are “for the healing of the nations.”

Ahhh. Home at Last!

Getting my friends home is God’s story to write. My part is to pick up my cross and walk out my door.

Will you join me?

Was Jesus Punctual?

by Suyai R. Cameron

I remember meeting many missionary families in church who loved Jesus so deeply that they had decided to leave their countries behind and move to the narrowest and longest country in South America: Chile. Although each one possessed different personalities, they had some similarities that made them stand out from the local crowd. One of the most obvious was their love of structured time and the way they expected everyone, including nationals, to always be punctual – and how frustrated they became with the laid-back attitude of Chileans when it came to starting times, and especially finishing times, of every church meeting or get-together.

Over the years, many of them opened up to me and shared, among myriad things, how they found themselves feeling disrespected by the apparent nonchalant attitude of Chileans towards time. Even though I was born and bred in Chile, I was raised by a French grandmother and British grandfather, and so I have always been acutely aware not only of how important time and efficiency are for most Westerners, but also how easily frustrating different aspects of any culture you migrate into can be. After moving to the UK as an adult and having spent almost fourteen years here, I can now further empathise with the expats I met in Chile and can better understand the massive gap between the Western and the Latin American concepts of time and how we experience it.

The English phrase ‘don’t waste your time’ has an equivalent in Spanish: ‘no pierdas el tiempo’, which strictly translated means ‘don’t lose [the] time’. There is, nonetheless, a subtle difference between the English and the Spanish. Whereas a Westerner feels they can control time (by deciding whether to waste it or not), a Latin American feels they cannot control time (it gets lost).

One of the many anecdotal theories I have come up with over the years is that efficiency permeates everything in the West. Countries function in apparent order; people respect queues; and if you meet a friend for coffee they will give you an exact hour of their time and then have something planned to do right afterwards. In Latin America, however, it is relationships that seep into every aspect of life. If you’re invited for lunch, you will probably also stay for dinner; you will be more likely to find a job if you know the ‘right’ people; and if you meet a friend for coffee, you will stay there for at least two hours, if not more. None of these things is inherently right or wrong. They are simply different ways in which cultural mindsets are wired and entrenched deep within us.

The other side of the cultural coin is what we experienced when we arrived in the UK and started inviting people to our house. We quickly realised we couldn’t just ask someone to come for lunch on the same day – we had to agree on a date at least a few weeks beforehand. When they finally arrived and departed after two hours at the most, we were left wondering what on earth we had said or done that had offended them, as they had left so soon. We were used to people staying after a meal for hours on end, just talking about nothing and everything. There is even a Spanish word which has no translation to English: sobremesa (literally ‘on the table’). It is used to describe the period of time after everyone has finished their meal but are still sitting down and chatting about life in a leisurely manner for a long time. Here, it seemed that if our guests intended to stay even a wee bit longer than two hours, we needed to actually do something together, like go for a walk or play a game. Leisure for leisure’s sake was simply not on the cards.

I remember pondering about the frustration Western mission partners felt about Chileans not complying with set times. The palpable irritation they felt when a meeting started half an hour or more after the set time whilst people took time to greet everyone in the room and catch up before it started, or when people casually walked into the church service forty minutes after it had already begun. Most Chileans couldn’t really grasp this and usually considered issues revolving around time as secondary and not to be taken into account that seriously.

Many times, this cultural clash got me thinking about Jesus – was he actually punctual? Although we know the Bible was written by Middle Eastern people, our minds tend to somehow forget this, and we end up mostly reading it from a Western perspective. Even growing up in Latin America, many are taught by Western mission partners and thus tend to use the same lens. We are drilled in church with the overuse (or, dare I say, misuse) of ‘God is a God of order’ (1 Corinthians 14:33) and that therefore one should always be mindful of time and respectful of time.

However, we can see throughout the Bible how relationships trumped efficiency most of the time. We see Jesus taking his time – days – to get to his friend Lazarus, who had died, even though people found it hard to accept that he wouldn’t hurry up and feared he would be too late. We have the Mary and Martha story, where Jesus praises Mary for simply sitting at his feet whilst Martha is making sure everything is ready and on time. We witness Jesus giving children unrestricted time to come to him despite the open frustration of his disciples. It is hard to imagine Jesus rushing people around to start or end a meeting, although I can’t picture him wasting time either.

Once my husband was told off for having preached just over twenty minutes at a church in the UK as surely he should have been able to preach five-minute sermons following the example of how Jesus taught (e.g. the parables)? I couldn’t help but think about Jesus feeding the multitudes as they stayed for the whole day just to listen to him teach for hours and hours. Just because you can read a parable in less than five minutes, it doesn’t mean it actually happened as quickly in real life!

So, was Jesus punctual? I believe it would be fair to say that perhaps Jesus wasn’t necessarily punctual, but he was indeed always on time. There is a difference. We see Jesus interacting with people from different backgrounds and gently adjusting to their culture whilst still modeling a countercultural way of living, even when his own experience of time knows no bounds. When ministering cross-culturally, how you experience time can be a challenge both for yourself and the ones you are ministering to. As with everything in life, we need to accommodate our cultural expectations accordingly.

Nevertheless, as Christians we belong to a much wider subculture. Depending on where we were raised, Jesus’ cultural understanding of time might not exactly match our cultural (mis)understanding of it. One thing is clear though: he always made time for people at the exact moment when they needed it, even when it did not seem ‘convenient’ or ‘right.’ The God of the Universe walking among us was – and is – all too familiar with time being eternal and with our hearts yearning for time spent with him no matter what our watches may try to dictate. Jesus didn’t see people as interruptions, but as valuable enfleshed souls requiring unconditional love and every single ounce of his attention, despite our own earthly understanding of time.

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Suyai R. Cameron cannot imagine a life without writing. She has lived in forty-six houses (and counting) across two continents and feels at home in at least four countries. Together with her husband and their son, they have been serving God in Northern Ireland, UK, for more than a decade. On top of working as an editor and translator, she enjoys dark chocolate, reading books under her velvety weighted blanket, leisurely walks through lush forests, and pondering on the intersection between the Bible and ordinary everyday life. You can follow her on Instagram at @suyai.r.cameron and on Facebook as Suyai R. Cameron.

How to grow your culture knowledge

In January Rachel Pieh Jones asked the question How Well Do You Know Your Host Nation? and challenged all of us to move beyond culture learning that focuses primarily on food and language. I have to admit that I fist pumped the air as I read and probably said a few too many

“Yes!”

Little did Rachel know, but I was working on just such a resource. Her words felt like a confirmation of God’s heart and desire for us to know the people we have come to serve.

One of the tricky parts of culture and cultural knowledge, however, is that it it’s easy to measure and judge each other, especially internally.

“My language skills will never be as good as hers!”

“Oh my word, I cannot believe that he didn’t know how rude he was being.”

The truth is, there is always someone who knows far more than you and someone who knows far less than you do. So, when it comes to culture, we need to be like runners who keep their eyes on their own lane and focus on making progress themselves. How about instead of judging each other, we encourage and equip each other to keep growing.

Sounds good, who is going to push back on that? But if you’re like me, I want to grow, but the busyness of life can get in the way of my good intentions. That’s why I created a four-week challenge that fosters a culture growth spurt by focusing on one area of culture each week: history, the arts, pop culture, and religion.

The challenge has two tracks, one for those of you new to a culture, and one for those of you who are old hands in culture. Each week you will be emailed three options for how you could grow that area of your culture knowledge and you choose one of the options. The challenge is designed for a one-to-two-hour time commitment each week.

Growth doesn’t just happen, but you also don’t have to figure out what to do all on your own. This challenge works well for individuals, families, and teams to do together and is available until May 13^th. You can join here.

Here is a taste of the challenge. The challenge uses the metaphor of a tree to picture your culture knowledge. This is part of the history week:

History can be a mixed bag, can’t it?! If you’ve already completed the option you picked earlier this week, you might have learned something about your host culture that inspired you. But it is just as likely that you learned something that broke your heart, angered, or confused you.

History is all of these things! It is inspiring and angering. It is laced with beauty and laced with injustice. It reveals God’s character and reveals the need for God. You need all of these aspects for your culture tree to grow in a balanced way . . . not just one part—a lone branch or leaves without a trunk.

If you haven’t started on the history options yet, that’s okay. Take a moment to think about when you will. This weekend? Tonight? Don’t overthink it, but do block out thirty minutes to an hour.

Just think of where your culture knowledge will be in four weeks if you don’t take the challenge. Probably not that different from what it is right now. But with the guidance and support of this challenge over the next four weeks? When Rachel asks the question How Well Do You Know Your Host Nation? With this challenge you can answer, “Better than I did!” You can join the free challenge today here.

P.S. Thank you Rachel for calling all of us to keep climbing! And here is a Prayer for Old Hands in a Culture — you can pray it for yourself or old hands you know.

Photo by Magdalena Love on Unsplash

How Do Cultural Factors Influence a Missionary’s Decision to Leave?

by Andrea Sears

In reviewing the cultural factors that are part of a missionary’s decision to return to their passport country, it is relevant to consider where survey participants served. Of the 714 survey participants who answered this question, the following chart represents the proportion that served in each region:

For the purposes of the chart, Mexico was included in Central America with other Latino cultures, though it is technically part of North America. Fifteen percent of participants served on more than one continent, and were given the “various” designation since they could not be assigned to only one continent. All others served in only one country, or in various countries within the same continent. The majority (68.2%) of participants served in one country only, 18.6% served in two countries, 7.6% served in three countries, and 5.6% served in four or more countries during their time on the mission field.

Because survey participants served all over the globe in very disparate cultures, their struggles were at times common and at times very different. We measured the frequency and strength of influence on the return decision for the following statements considered to be host-country-related factors:

I struggled with the local language of my host country.
I struggled with the local culture of my host country.
I struggled with local relationships in my host country.
I missed the developed world.
I experienced security issues.
I had limited access to electricity and/or technology.
I felt taken advantage of by locals for resources.
I experienced conflict with locals that grew out of cultural differences.
I experienced conflict with locals that was unaffected by cultural differences.
I had to leave the country because of immigration/visa issues.
I was in danger of persecution because of my faith/vocation.
I was in danger of persecution because of my nationality.
Political instability or armed conflict made it too dangerous to stay.
National economic instability made it untenable to stay.
The government restricted missionary activities to the point that I was unable to work in the area of my calling.
The climate was difficult for me to live in.
A natural disaster caused me to be evacuated.

Results
This group of factors has relatively low strength indexes for most of the items. While some cultural factors have very high numbers of people experiencing them, usually these factors did not affect the decision to leave, and if it did, it did so to a small degree.

Two of the strongest factors in this group were: (1) having to leave the country because of immigration/visa issues and (2) having security issues. Interestingly, the issues experienced by the most people are thankfully those that are at least in part within the missionary’s locus of control, such as the first four statements on the list. This is a place to look for preventable attrition and prepare missionaries to better weather cultural stress.

Language Study
We also collected data on how long each participant studied the language of their host culture (in a formal sense), in order to see if there is a correlation between length of study and tenure, or between length of study and reporting a struggle with the language.

Based on this data, the greatest proportion of those who studied formally did so for at least 9 months, though there is a small bump at 3-6 months. Those who spent at least 3 months in formal language study stayed on the field for at least an average of 9 ½ years, while those who did not study or studied for less than 3 months had an average of 6-7 years of tenure.

The majority of participants admitted to difficulty with the language, regardless of whether or how long they studied it. However, those studying more than 6 months tended to have their language struggles factor less into their return decision. Those studying less than 3 months more often reported that language was a moderate to strong factor in their return decision.

Culture Struggles
We also collected open comments on the following question: “What aspects of the local culture did you struggle with?”

Themes that consistently emerged in the comments, ranked by prevalence, were: (1) honor/shame culture and the resulting style of indirect communication, (2) income disparity, (3) gender inequity, (4) corruption/crime, (5) demands of hospitality and having less privacy, and (6) less focus on order/efficiency.

Other themes also frequently mentioned were visibly not fitting in, language difficulties, fatalism, different concepts of time/pace of life, local supernaturalistic beliefs, and different cleanliness/hygiene standards.

Unfortunately, comments about culture often contained tones of negative judgment, with indirect communication being categorized as “dishonesty” or fatalism being called “laziness.” One thing we can learn from these responses is that our own worldview permeates deep in our psyche and defines for us what we think is the “right” way to do things, leading us to evaluate others unfavorably when they don’t share our values. Part of being a successful missionary is intentionally rooting out our own ethnocentrism in expecting others to be like us (or to work on becoming like us).

Local Relationships
We also collected comments on the question: “What did you struggle with in your local relationships?”

Themes commonly mentioned were language barriers, developing intimacy and trust, the time required to build friendship as an outsider, differing relationship expectations, and distinguishing between true friendships and ministry.

Conclusion
Culture shock and culture stress are common, but also expected and apparently not a primary direct cause of missionary attrition. But they certainly affect the quality of the missionary experience and impact the overall resilience of the missionary. And lowered resilience certainly does affect missionary attrition.

Conclusions and recommendations include preparing missionaries to cross-cultures well, including a list of topics to cover in training and coaching; learning and using the skill of cognitive reframing to minimize ethnocentrism; curbing certain Western tendencies to adjust to different settings; and self-care.

To see the full detailed report and discussion of results, click here. You can subscribe on the website for notifications when future results are published. You can also email andrea.d.sears@gmail.com for a pdf if you want to save or share the results.

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Andrea Sears is co-founder of the ministry giveDIGNITY, which works in the marginalized community of La Carpio in San Jose, Costa Rica. The ministry focuses on Christ-centered community development initiatives in education, vocation, and violence prevention. Her family has been in Costa Rica for 8 years, and served as the Missionaries in Residence at John Brown University during the 2017-2018 year while on furlough.

A Trip to the Embassy

by Seth Lewis

I was excited. We’d only lived in Ireland a few months—long enough to begin to feel the reality of deep differences, but not nearly long enough to adjust to them. Our second son had just been born, a different experience in a different medical system, and we needed to register his birth at the United States embassy. American soil, in Ireland. It would be nice to get a little taste of all we’d left behind. A few hours on the motorway got us to Dublin, where we found the US embassy—a big round thing looking out of place on its street-corner, like a landed UFO. Like us.

To get through the outer wall, we had to go through security. I hadn’t anticipated that, but it made sense, and I knew what to do. On the other side of the metal detector, the ground was American. Even the flowers were red, white, and blue. This was going to be fun.

I opened the door to the UFO, and was immediately struck by the lack of country music. Not even rock. Nothing. Just another security guard, another metal detector, and a sign that said “Please take a number”. A number? I’m not a number, I’m an American! This is my embassy!

I took a number. White walls and tiles. Uncomfortable chairs. Drop ceiling. I knew there was a ballroom in the building, but no one offered to show it to me. Come to think of it, the room did look familiar. I’d seen this set up before, in America, at the Department of Motor Vehicles and the Social Security Office.

An embassy is a US government office. I should have known it would look like one. That I would hear several people being refused before I got a turn to hand my number through the thick (bullet proof?) glass and hope I had every form and supporting document exactly right. Somehow I had thought they would be as happy as I was to see another American. I had wanted a taste of things we left behind. I got one.

We walked out past the red, white, and blue flowers and through the security gate. On the other side, the Irish ground felt a little more like home. In the car, I played country music.

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Seth Lewis has lived on the south coast of the Republic of Ireland for the last ten years with his wife Jessica; two of their three children were born there. He works with a network of local churches who are committed to church planting and also assists with a local Bible college and youth camp ministry. Before moving overseas, Seth worked with a church in Virginia. His accent doesn’t really fit anywhere anymore, and he’s okay with that. You can find him online at sethlewis.ie.

When Debriefing, Leave Your Shoes—and Socks—at the Door

When we first moved to Asia, one of the customs we needed to learn was not wearing shoes in someone’s home. It’s one of those cultural things. But starting out, we had our reasons for wanting to leave our shoes on. It’s convenient. What about the holes in my socks? I don’t want you to smell my feet—and I don’t want to smell yours! It just doesn’t feel right.

But It didn’t take long for going shoeless inside to become our habit, and even our preference. Then we’d fly back to the West and upon landing we’d again be in the land of most-people-wear-shoes-in-the-house. Of course, we still could take ours off, and we often did. But sometimes it was easier just to leave them on. Then it was back on the plane (where, a recent headline proclaims, you should never take your shoes off), and we’d start to reset our minds about a whole range of things.

Back and forth. Back and forth. It can all get pretty confusing. Sometimes we need help sorting things out—things much bigger and deeper than clothing choices. A great opportunity for processing on those issues, whether you’re finishing a term, or a lifetime, overseas, is a set-aside time for in-depth, personal debriefing. And for that kind of debriefing, regardless of the location, shoes, and socks, don’t belong.

OK. Now I’ve moved to speaking figuratively, so let me continue in that vein and talk a little about feet. Most of us aren’t that crazy about how ours look. There are crooked toes, calluses, bunions, blisters, and unclipped or ingrown toenails. And then there’s that smell. Yes, missionaries may have the beautiful feet of Romans 10:15, but they don’t always seem that way to the ones who own them—thus the socks and shoes. Debriefing, though, should be about openness and trust, showing your feet, so to speak, as they truly are. But that’s not always easy.

Maybe you’d like to keep your running shoes on. Debriefing is just another mile marker in your race from agency to church to summer camp to appointment. You’re on a tight schedule, and while you’re tired and thirsty, the most you can do is grab a paper cup of water as you run by. Even when you stand still, you’re jogging in place.

Or maybe you don’t want to take off your work boots. You come to debriefing only reluctantly. This is your spouse’s idea or your team suggested it or maybe your agency told you you had to come. So you make phone calls during the breaks and answer emails until late at night. Mental multitasking keeps your thoughts half a world away.

Or maybe it’s your dress shoes that you don’t want to take off. You’re ready for the debriefing questions the same way you’d be ready for a job interview or performance evaluation. It’s like when your boss asks you “What’s your greatest weakness?” The trick is to come up with something that sounds honest but doesn’t reveal too much, maybe even sneaking in a strength, all the while avoiding the too obvious “I struggle with being a perfectionist” or “Sometimes I just care too much.” When you’re asked how you are, you say “fine” and tell how well your ministry is going.

That’s not the way debriefing should be. Effective debriefing requires barefoot honesty and vulnerability. But I do need to add here that that’s not solely on you (no pun intended). You need to be in the right environment, the right culture, to bare your feet. Not everyone can offer that.

You probably don’t share everything with your agency, church, supporters, or family, because they’re, well, your agency, church, supporters, or family. And that’s what makes the debriefings offered by independent member-care individuals and organizations so valuable. Yes, debriefing can cost money and time that you could spend elsewhere, but it also has so much to give in return.

It has experienced facilitators who know the right questions to ask and who know how to listen, even to words unsaid. They see beyond your status as a missionary, knowing how much your vocation impacts you, yet knowing that there is much more to your identity. They won’t decide your future but can help you figure out the path ahead. They are safe. They are encouraging. They won’t report to others what you tell them but, if needed, can guide you to those who can give you more care.

And if you join with a group of other missionaries for debriefing, you get the extra blessing of forming a community that speaks the same language (and I’m not talking about English here), that can relax around each other, that can laugh at shared jokes and cry over shared losses, that can find comfort in each other’s quiet presence.

No one can demand your trust, but your trust can be earned. No one can make you take off your shoes, but when the ground below you becomes holy, removing your shoes becomes a natural response. And it will invite those around you to a deeper level of honesty.

When you travel abroad, pick up on the cues where you are and follow their shoe-wearing customs. When you fly, you should strongly consider leaving your shoes on (seriously, here’s another article on that topic). When you go to debriefing—and I encourage you to do so—I hope you’ll be able to leave your shoes, and socks, at the door. It’s one of those cultural things.

[photo: “Shoes,” by Long Road Photography, used under a Creative Commons license]