Let's Start On Time

Change is happening all the time, all around us. Most of the time you don’t even notice, it’s so subtle or not even worth mentioning. Other times it seems monumental, even life changing. Inherent in change is the loss of what was in order to accept what now is. Growth and new things, even thriving, don’t happen without it. Sometimes this is as easy as breathing in and out. Other times, it takes a little more effort…

“You’re late” she says with a bright smile as you walk in the door just at the moment you were sure you were supposed to arrive. You look around and immediately notice that everyone else is already out there, doing what they are supposed to be doing because they arrived early in order to be ready to start on time.

The irony of it hits you full on, and you want to laugh out loud at the new reflection of yourself mirrored in this brief exchange. The culture in which you’ve been living this past 14 years is to never arrive on time and to most definitely never consider showing up early, ever. Your memory trips back to those early years when you were new to that far-away foreign place – the irritation and frustration as you waited for guests to show up while you watched your carefully prepared food turn cold. Then there’s the time you arrived right on time at a wedding reception just to wait nearly two hours for the bride and groom to show up – you promised yourself you would learn how to adapt to these new norms.

Now, you find yourself needing to re-learn the cultural norms that had, at one time, been your norm. Hopefully, you will adapt quickly because you may miss out when you show up late.

A sense of humor is essential in all this because the reverse culture shock can sometimes be much more shocking than the initial cross-cultural shock ever was – what you once were needed to adapt so that you could fit in to what they are, just so you can come back here to unlearn and re-adapt. Either you laugh until you cry or you cry until you laugh – but somehow there are tears and laughter involved in this crazy process called reverse culture shock.

What about those times when you’re sitting with new friends trying to participate in the conversation and you realize, wait a minute, what’s a “cup cozy” or what’s a “weighted blanket”? Tracking with conversations requires you to ask questions you know will alert everyone to the fact that you’re not from here (in case they hadn’t figured that out already).

Then there are those other times when your new friends start telling stories about “remember when” or special holidays. You immediately chime in with your own anecdotes – the time you were watching from your second-floor bedroom window as your neighbor slaughtered a sheep in his yard for Qurban Eid. Or the other time, also for Qurban Eid, a different neighbor brought you a bag of fresh apples and apologized for that time he was so obnoxiously rude.

Eventually you realize the stories your new friends share don’t resemble your stories, and it seems that rather than building a new connection here, you may be putting up walls. How do you genuinely share yourself and your stories with one another when what you’ve experienced is so different? How do you begin to build some shared history together when you haven’t had any? And then I guess you can’t help but wonder sometimes if it’s worth it.

After more than a decade of living overseas and cultivating deep friendships and regularly saying goodbyes, I would say, with all my heart, it’s more than worth it. It’s worth going all in wherever you are for however long God allows you to be there. Why? Because it changes you. You grow deeper and stronger and brighter and better. And sometimes you end up with friends all over the world, and sometimes you end up crossing paths again, somewhere. But one thing is for sure, you will never be the same again, growing, thriving, changing.