theneener

Asia Unpacked: Part 1.

By neener | August 27, 2007

For those of you expecting the lowdown on what I got to do in East Asia, you’ll have to wait. Like I said in my last post, I got back Saturday night and then slept for about 14 hours. The sleeping was mostly because I was tired and also recovering from a head cold. But it is also my defense mechanism and I was defending “reverse culture shock.”

East Asia was amazing. I got along with three other people I didn’t really know before, made some really good friends overseas, and ate some crazy things. Through this, I saw different characteristics of God I’m sure I would never a million years see in my little life in the U.S.A. One of the reasons why I saw differently was, duh, I was on the complete other side of the world. Eastern culture is crazy different than Western culture. I’ll get to that in future posts when/if I get to unpack a few details.

One of the other reasons why I saw other characteristics of God was because I didn’t have my comforts at all. Other than my team members from America, my photo album (that I initially carried to start conversations with the locals, but ended up as a good reminder of my buddies back home), and my bag of Skittles, everything else was shaky ground. The fact that I didn’t have a good friend to run to, a TV to space out with, a burger and beer to relax, or my comfy bed to end the day with, ended up being enough to fall back on God instead of these other things.

With these idols out of the way, I saw the best and the worst of me. And through the best times, I was able to thank God because I knew for a fact it wasn’t because of my flesh that I was able to endure full 7am - midnight days, hold conversations in broken English, and learn to love people who I have little in common with. And through my worst times, I was able to thank GodÂ that He could show me how ridiculously ugly and dark I can get and that He loves me the same.

It’s really hard to unpack the past two weeks, even if I did get to chronicle every day here, my words would do the experience a great injustice. A teammate and I spoke briefly tonight and we both agreed that we were experiencing “reverse culture shock.” I understood him when he said he felt like the experience was being taken away… like it was some twilight zone in which nothing happened. But of course something happened, something huge happened in all of us in which we learned so much in two weeks on the other side of the world… and trying to bring everything back and apply it to our lives in the Western world, a world all too familiar, is enough to make my head spin. As soon as I got back to the states, even as I sat in at LAX, my brain was reeling from the many differences already! I nitpicked so much within an hour and felt so bad for doing so. There are definitely pros and cons to every culture, so of course it was easy to come back to something I know and then instantly see the cons to it. However, when I got back home to smiling faces and a late birthday present - a complete cleaning of my apartment! - I started to see the pros again.

So how will I do it? How will I be able to take this new knowledge, this revigorated heart and spread this light in Dallas, Texas? How can I continue having a missionary life in the Western world which has its own barriers against the Gospel? These are the things I prayed before leaving and I ask these questions now. It will be interesting to see what God has planned for me now, that’s for sure!

Tags: Asia, mission