“So, what did you like about Taiwan?” I was asked this question during a follow-up meeting after our first two-week visit to Taiwan. I must confess that my answer was, “Nothing.” That doesn’t sound like a good missionary response, but it was the truth at that time. The early days of life in a new culture are full of change and adjustment. I often encounter other cross-cultural servants voicing their stress and pain while dealing with cultural adjustment. Everything is unfamiliar. It’s often very uncomfortable. You don’t understand what you are seeing and experiencing. You don’t really like any of it. It just feels so bad. What should we do? How do we respond?
Retreat is a natural tendency.
Often, we would like to respond by changing our circumstances, so we don’t feel so bad. We focus on making our homes as comfortable as possible. We diligently seek out places to buy foods from our home country. We gravitate towards people who will speak to us in English. We retreat from our new culture. This may look like withdrawing into the safety of our homes rather than walking out the door and engaging with people. Or it may be a retreat into the comfortable world of social media or entertainment—anything to avoid the stress of engagement with a new unfamiliar world. There is a real danger that we will live trying to escape the necessity of self-denial.
Fight for engagement.
There is a place for finding a way to survive in your new setting. You do have to find food that you are able to eat. You do have to deal with your physical adjustment to a new climate, new sicknesses, new methods of transportation, new everything. At the beginning, you can speak with only those who know English or who are willing to listen to you struggle to say, “The book is on the table,” or other similarly elementary expressions. The beginning of cultural adjustment is exhausting. You will need extra rest. Sometimes you will need to retreat. But you don’t want to stay there. You must not allow yourself to set your default as “I don’t like this. How can I change it?” Your thinking needs to be, “How can I change to better serve here?” You must keep coming back and fighting for engagement with the new culture.
Share in suffering: self-denial.
What does that look like? What should you tell yourself when you are faced with the unfamiliar, uncomfortable, and not even likable place and people that now surround you? I suggest that you counsel yourself to “share in suffering as a good soldier of Christ Jesus” (2 Timothy 2:3). I had to keep telling myself, “It doesn’t matter what I feel like. I must keep doing the right thing.” For me, the right thing looked like persisting in language study when I was weary of the work. It meant eating yet another new food and trying to get my kids to eat it. It meant walking out the door just to be where people were, rather than staying in the comfort of our house. It meant picking up the phone and facing the fear of making a call in Chinese. Really, it meant staying through discomfort. Trying to be cheerful and content even when we felt uncomfortable. Getting up day after day and doing the day’s work without complaint. Just a lot of self-discipline and self-denial. Did I do that faithfully all the time? No. Am I where I want to be now with cultural engagement? No. I have so far to go, and I look back on our early years and wish that I had endured much more patiently. But God faithfully kept me and my family through it. He has given each of us exactly what we needed to endure.
Fix your mind on the “why.”
What truth has He given to keep you going with cultural adjustment when it feels so hard? You must fix your mind on your reason you are doing it. All this pain is for the sake of knowing Christ and making Him known. You are learning to eat pork fat and steamed bread not just so you can swallow food and keep yourself alive, but so that you can sit with a friend, enjoy her cooking, and tell her about Jesus, the bread of life. When you are daily faced with the choice of studying your language lesson as you know you should, or just reading your favorite book because it’s so much easier, remember the comfort of knowing Christ, and the misery your neighbor across the wall is facing without Him. How can you tell him about Jesus if you can’t speak to him? There is something so much greater at stake than my personal comfort. We must learn to know and love this new culture so that people can learn to know and love Christ.
Joy comes through humility.
It takes humility to learn a new way to do things, a new language to speak, to let your tastes and preferences, diet and wardrobe be changed. Learning humility is painful, but it is also filled with joy. We are following the example of Christ. He too entered a new culture. He humbled Himself far more than we ever will when He became a man. We get to be shaped more like Him in His humility. We also get to share in His glory. Think about it. We get to have a part in bringing people to know Christ Jesus. God lets us share in His redemption plan. The joy is worth every bit of suffering we are walking through now.
It gets better!
In the meantime, be encouraged; the discomfort, stress, and fatigue of cultural adjustment is normal. Keep going. Living in your new place will not always be so hard. The unfamiliar gradually becomes familiar and maybe even beloved. You will find countless foods you love to eat, places you love to go. You will learn to know and love people. One day, this new, unfamiliar place will feel like home. You must be willing to go through all the discomfort of learning a new way of life for the sake of sharing the Gospel. May the Lord give you grace to “endure everything for the sake of the elect, that they also may obtain the salvation that is in Christ Jesus with eternal glory” (2 Timothy 2:10).