To Do, To Be

I get the question, “how’s your transition going?” quite often these days. To answer that, I submit the following story:

Saturday evening, my mom sent me to the grocery store with $50 and a list of things to buy for our Mother’s Day barbeque. In the past it has been pretty common for US grocery stores to elicit moments of cultural crisis in me, so I thought I had steeled myself pretty well for the excursion! But, after successfully navigating the two enormous dairy cases of specialty cheese looking for feta, I found myself standing in front of the vast ocean of prepackaged chicken parts. And I could not begin to make a decision about what to buy to save my life. More than the choices, I found I was baffled by the prices – is $18.61 for 4 large boneless skinless chicken breasts too much? Is that a good deal? What about hamburger? Is $3.99 a pound a lot? Since I’m now used to shopping with litas, (1 Lt = .30 US), everything in the store seemed too expensive. In the end, I had to call my mom from the store and ask her what was a good price for chicken. And even after all that, I got to the checkout counter with $63 worth of groceries and only $50 in cash. Then came the humiliating process of putting items back until I got the bill down to $49.75!

When I finally loaded everything into the car, I stopped for a moment, put my head down on the steering wheel and cried!

Re-entry “shock” is simply this: the ordinary tasks of life – the things you need to know how to do to feed, shelter and dress yourself, and get yourself from place to place – have to be relearned and adjusted to. The cues you use to make sense of everyday life (what language to speak, how polite to be, what things cost) have shifted. Even the most basic aspects of daily life (what to eat, what to wear) can be confusing, and lead to frustration. I’ve spent the last two weeks being constantly over-dressed everywhere I go, and unsure of what/how to cook for myself – which has meant a lot of macaroni and cheese, and eating out!

Even so, I have done this transition thing a lot now so I tend to think that I am immune from its stresses, as if I alone can swim through differing cultures like some sort of new species of globalized fish! My standard approach to times of transition is to shield myself from frustration through an elaborate and detailed system of to-do lists. As long as I can maintain an illusion of purposeful accomplishment, I can stay afloat.

The problem here is that I sense in my spirit that I have become like Martha in Luke 10, finding my security in what I am doing to serve the Lord rather than in sitting and quietly listening to Him. It is SO easy in my home culture to feel like I have to accomplish something every day or I’m just being lazy. The past couple days though, I have been thinking about what it means to have Mary’s heart, to sit and listen to my Lord, just to BE with Him.

For me, being with Jesus probably means a lot of time sitting in coffee shops, reading the Bible and staring out the window; car drives that go nowhere, when I can pray out-loud and sing praise songs. It means resting, thinking, talking with sisters in the Lord, and generally not accomplishing much that can be crossed off a to-do list. But this is what I really, really need to do in these weeks at home. These times of transition, when I feel like a fish-out-of-water, when I feel truly lost and insecure, are when Jesus wants to come in and remind me that my security is not in my routines or my cultural wherewithal, in my to-do lists or my human relationships. My security is in Him. Only. Always.