It’s good to get out of yourself every now and then. Just open up, walk right out and see the world. Part of its goodness is that otherwise, it’s hard to figure out just how much of your environment is just a personal sense of comfort that you take for granted. How much of your sense of normalcy is really just having your own little culture accepted as normal?
But transplant yourself into 
a somewhere completely different than home, and you’re in for a pleasant surprise.
It’s good for your soul to be reminded that you are a very small being in this universe. History is so deep that we would drown without someone else’s shoulders to stand on. And this world is so vast that we could easily get lost without someone to find us.
English is not the language of the human. America is not the center of the universe. You, your gender, your culture and preferences are not the norm of the universe. Deep down inside, we’ve got to know that. But a reminder never hurts.
It’s good to feel completely out of the loop in another culture. It’s good to feel a little bewildered by a language you don’t know, and by the sense that you really should try to use it in order to be respectful. It’s refreshing to visit a culture of image-bearers who think of their village, their city, their country as their home and not as a tourist trap.
It’s not that they’ve got this humility thing down, and you’re the only one that’s missing out. We’re all missing out, and we all find just a little bit more of who we are, on a visit to some of our family and neighbors.
As always, Patrice brings me to think harder and deeper about all things real. I recently spent some time with my almost 20-year-old daughter who had been contemplating how she became who she was. She reflected on being an only child who was often referred to as “spoiled” because she experienced so much more in her childhood years than many of her peers and cousins. I found it enlightening that she gave credit to her dad and I for “not taking her places to spoil her” but rather that her parents believed in travel and seeing other places and “we chose to include her with us.” Her refelection caused me to recognize, perhaps for the first time, that what did so naturally was actually a conscious choice which would later have an impact on her. She credited us as parents who are “just teachers” who chose to spend our money on travel experiences rather than a bigger house, more things, or a better car. We believed in a world bigger than ourselves and experiences greater than our own every-days in order to create balance and perspective. I am grateful that we gave her this life lesson…I’m learning she is a better adult because of the experiences we were able to include her in.
Amen, my friend. You get it. Let’s share it!