Making Sense of It All: Wow!

Wonderful welcome, water, weather, wealth, waste, waist (as in “wide”), wild world, Why? No friends, this post is not sponsored by the letter “w”. As contrived as it may seem though, after fourteen months in the global South, many of the first words that come to mind begin with that letter. Here are my first impressions of being back in the States.

How wonderful it is to be welcomed by and reunited with family and friends, and to see familiar surroundings. How much more I appreciate certain things about which I hadn’t previously given much thought. Simple things. Mmmm, water—what a pleasure to drink my first glass of tap water—not boiled or filtered—and with ice cubes to boot. Ah, a hot shower, and so much more than a trickle of water. How fantastic to see the autumn foliage—and yeah, a change of seasons—as winter pays its annual visit.

It's impossible not to notice our vast material wealth. It didn’t take the cornucopia of food served around the table at Thanksgiving for this to register. In Zambia I was used to watching barefoot Zambian children in tattered clothes on dirt fields darting after soccer balls—balls consisting of two or three clear plastic bread bags scrunched together and wrapped with a few rubber bands. Watching a niece's soccer game in north Jersey recently, I realized what a privilege it is to have a leather or vinyl ball. Did I mention the girls’ smart blue and white soccer uniforms and black leather cleats, or the snappy athletic bags each player had slung over her shoulder? While overseas I became conscious of how competitive we Americans are. Based on my unscientific anecdotal observations since returning, we seem to have a comfortable lead in the race to see who has the world’s widest waistlines. I was shocked the other day, to see an NFL-sponsored TV commercial encouraging parents to get their children to spend an hour a day playing outdoors. With something like 40% of our kids purportedly clinically obese, it’s come to public service parenting lessons from the National Football League?

My zigzags have made me more aware of how much waste we generate individually and as a society, as well as how wasteful we are. We waste a tremendous amount of food. We dispose of reusable things too. In Zambia, valued perhaps because of their scarcity, re-sealable Ziploc plastic bags get washed and re-used. We pitch them, maybe because of our enslavement to the clock and efficiency, or a haughty attitude that causes us to perceive such re-use as either cheap or unduly frugal. Do we not talk a better game about our concern for the environment than we walk?

This one may surprise you: NYC. Morning rush. Subway. I was floored by the spontaneous, orderly manner in which people shuffled through the crowded underground and cars, and their civility toward each other. Would you believe that we seem friendlier than when I left. Or maybe it's me! Perhaps in all my zigzagging, some Zambian and other global-South-friendliness rubbed off on me! I hope so. It's also been refreshing to see the ethnic and racial diversity of humanity with which we Americans are so richly blessed. Few countries have this the way we do. What a gift. Also welcome was American efficiency. I realized this buying a subway ticket and being served lunch in a Vietnamese restaurant. I was pleasantly surprised that a shrimp soup I’d had in Cambodia last month tasted pretty much the same in NYC, though it didn’t come as a surprise that it cost more than four times more here!

In many ways my homecoming has been, well, weird and surreal. I think the questions I have about our world—cultural, theological, historical, political, and personal—are changing, and multiplying. It seems as if I've stepped into several different worlds. The funny thing is, lately I've become conscious of reminding myself that all these disparate worlds are real, comprising a single reality. At the same time, the people and places I've gone each has its own culture, values, hopes, dreams, struggles, defeats, victories, history, present, and future.

What a wild and wonderful world we live in. I wish Brent and Erin Raska, my successors as Global Ministry Fellow, well. They're off to a fantastic start. Now that the Ws have run their course, so has this blog. Thank you for reading and for the prayers, encouragement, and support you’ve given me as I’ve zigzagged the global South. Though I will no doubt be unraveling these fourteen months for years to come, I think I’m beginning to see what T.S. Eliot meant when he said that, “The end of all exploring will be to arrive where we started and to know the place for the first time.” God's grace, peace, and joy!