I recently had a conversation with a friend currently overseas and we discussed the fact that once you live for an extended time overseas you are ruined forever. That is, you can't belong to either your own culture or your adopted one anymore. You see the world from a unique perspective and you will often feel like a fish out of water wherever you go. As I thought more about our conversation I came up with a list of six things that living overseas does to you:
1. You realize the world is far bigger than you knew. When you live overseas you experience a larger world. When you lived in your home culture you heard about other cultures, but you didn't experience them (high school culture fairs don't count :-D). When you live overseas you all of a sudden come to understand that the world is really more than your home corner of it.
2. You begin to see foreigners as complex instead of simplistic. It's easy to see foreign people as one dimensional when you don't get to know them. It's easy to paint a whole culture one way and assume you know exactly what the think and why they think it. But when you actually begin to make foreign friends and go deep, all your preconceptions are challenged. You find people really are individuals no matter what culture they are from.
3. You stop seeing America as the answer to all the world's problems. Not all, but a lot of Americans think Americans have all the answers. I get that. My guess is most cultures would claim their culture has all the answers since that is all they know. So since my culture is American, it was America I realized wasn't sovereign when I lived overseas. There were things the culture I lived in did better than America. There were ideas they had and ways they acted that showed me they had something to contribute to the world just as much as Americans did.
4. You appreciate some of your own culture more. The culture I lived in did do some things better than America, but America does some things better than the culture. I appreciated America had provided me with security and a freedom that was not necessarily apparent in my host culture.
5. You experience the universal nature of the church. Best of all, you get to worship with people of another culture. You get to see the Bible and God's word through their lens. You start to realize there are ways to see scripture that differ from yours and that's okay (I am not talking about fundamental basics here. I am talking about something like how the famine in the Joseph story impresses your students from poor farming families who farm with implements from the 1800s far more than you who never worked on a farm in your life). And as you view Christianity through a different lens you start to see the cultural trappings of the way you do Christianity, those things that are not biblical, but cultural. They aren't necessarily wrong either, but they aren't necessarily right. You learn Christianity is far broader than you knew and, indeed, is a religion for anyone.
6. When you come home, you struggle with your home culture and your home church. Because of #1-5, you feel odd in your home culture. You feel odd in church, too. It takes time to reorient and you'll never reorient completely. You'll think things no one else thinks. You'll say things people don't get. Maybe you'll be labeled as odd, not with it, wrong thinking. When I have friends coming back to the States, I often tell them to be patient with themselves and their home culture. Remember that people here haven't had your experience. There is now a gap in experience, but that is okay. Just as we went overseas with the desire to understand the people in our host culture, we need to desire to understand the people in our home culture. And hang in there. You'll meet people who have lived overseas, too, and then you can commiserate together :-D
Actually, I think you can have all the above experiences within your own culture, too. For example, the United States isn't uniform. If you ever live in another part of the country than you grew up in you will experience this. Even if you just minister to a different socioeconomic group in your own area you can experience this. I think it's good to experience people in other places whether overseas or at home. It helps us to see the world more broadly and to sympathize with those different from ourselves. And above all, it makes us appreciate the image of God in all people everywhere.
Very well-spoken and I'd agree with every point. I'd say growing up in Utah, going to school in Iowa and living in Texas and Oklahoma gave me this same perspective, but living and traveling overseas has definitely changed me in ways that just living in different regions didn't do. It was fascinating to travel to several countries in Europe recently and see the things in each culture that had been imported from the US and, perhaps even more fascinating, to see the things that had been imported from Russia. It was also very interesting to see Russian cognates in many of those languages (not as surprising to see English cognates) and to wonder about cognates across many language groups.
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