A Little Taste of Heaven

Man, Heaven is going to be so insanely awesome. I can’t even imagine a place with no language or cultural boundaries. A place where we can join together with people from every people group, praising God and enjoying Him forever.

We get a little taste of Heaven every Sunday morning. Since we live near town right now, many of the people here have been exposed to the Gospel and are true believers. Across the dirt road from our base is a little national church that meets outside under a big blue tarp. Not many attend the service. It’s usually pretty hot and sticky. But it’s a beautiful time of fellowship and worshiping God together.

It gives me chills each time we sing together in the trade language. Yeah, it’s a relatively simple language, but they still convey the greatness and majesty of God in a beautiful way in their songs. We are so blessed to be a part of this local body of believers for our 4 months here!

The New "Normal"

Man, we’ve been here for 6 weeks already! As I look out our screen window and listen to the afternoon noises, it feels like a lifetime has gone by since we lived in Oregon. There have been a lot of changes and adjustments to our definition of “normal”. 

Learning to wash clothes like the people do... by hand!

Days for us are usually full of language and culture learning, though we have begun to realize that flexibility is key in this culture! You may show up to a national person’s home for a planned language session and realize that they decided to leave to go to town without telling you first. Here that is very culturally acceptable, but to our Western mindset, it can sometimes be frustrating. Flexibility and forgiveness are two very important things for any missionary!

Using some printed photos to learn about an event... and recording the info to listen to later

So what does a typical day look like for us? Well, it depends on the day and the week, but generally, here’s a rough outline of our daily life.

6:30 or 7:00am – Wake up, breakfast, devotions, etc

8:00am – Monday and Wednesday we have official classes; other days we spend out in the local villages learning about life here with our national friends. Somewhere in here, Kyler takes a nap.

12:00pm – Lunch break

1:00pm – Kyler usually takes another nap. Clint and I use this time to process what we’ve learned in the morning. We input all our language and culture data into the computer so we can have it for future reference.

2:00pm – We usually have a formal language session with some national friends. They help us with words we don’t understand or things we would like more info on. We try to use the trade language as much as possible with them, even though they understand quite a bit of English (this is common around the bigger towns, but not at all common in the remote jungle locations)

4:30pm – We usually take some more time to process our information and data as well as review old information to keep it fresh.

5:30pm – We stop study for the day and enjoy some family/free time.

So for us, language and culture study is pretty much a full time deal. Clint gets about 40 hours of study a week, and I average about 30. Our first language check is coming up in a week and a half, so you can be praying that we will be able to learn a lot more between now and then! :)

Not Wrong. Just Different

If you’ve ever experienced life in another culture, you know how different it can be. Everything is so strange and new. A lot of it isn’t wrong or bad. Just different.

We’ve been here a month already. Enough time to realize how much we love it, but also to see how different it is.

For instance, people here view work very differently than we do. In America and in most of the Western world, time is of the essence. We praise efficiency and hard workers. Here, it’s very different. They value people far more than work. It’s very common for people to take breaks from work to interact with each other. They may be building a house, but it might take them a week to accomplish what we could do in a day because they value the relationships more than getting the job done. It’s a huge compliment here if they tell you that you are a friendly person and smile a lot. They love for you to just sit and spend time with them. It’s not wrong. Just different.

This is why it’s SO important for us to study the culture here and not just the language. If we present the Gospel in a Western manner, it probably won’t really resonate with the people. Of course, God can use any type of presentation. But the most effective way to share God’s Word is in a way that relates to the hearers.

Being in another culture also challenges me to really think through things I believe and value as an American and hold them up against the Bible to see if they are really in line with God’s values. That’s one of the reasons why I think diversity is so awesome, especially in the Body of Christ. Yeah, we may be different and it may be hard and frustrating at times to understand why they do things the way they do. But it’s so neat to realize that where my culture fails, they may be able to pull me up.

So my view on culture study? Bring it on!!!

Kyler loves helping Daddy study :)