A whole new ballgame...

Today I got an email about baseball. It was, I think, the most incredible thing that has happened to me in Africa so far. The latest news from the States: The Cubs are still terrible. And, as I told my other friend, it’s always good to get comforting news from the home front, and what could be more comforting and familiar than a wasted July for the Cubs? It doesn’t get much more familiar than that.

The other day, I tried to pull up the Cubs Web site. It didn’t come up all the way, but it did load the background—a blue field spotted with the Cubs “C” logo—and, really, that was enough for me. It made me so happy. (It’s not like the actual contents of the Web site—say, for example, the Cubs record—would be at all uplifting anyway.)

Truth be told, I’m going through a bit of culture shock. That’s hard for me to say, because the prideful part of me wants to believe I’ll be able to make the transition to an entirely different culture very smoothly and without extreme emotion or turmoil. But, here I am saying it—I’m going through culture shock. God is teaching me that denying it will just make it worse. Besides, a huge thrust of this training has been about adapting to our new culture. Surely, I should be a good steward of what I’m learning and put it into practice. As it turns out, everyone—even the strongest of the strong—goes through culture shock.

So I’ll humble myself to the reality, eat the weird food, handle the many stares, stumble through the broken conversations and cultural misunderstandings, cry the tears and get through it.

And this is only the beginning.

Being in such a new and different place is great, taking in all the strange sights, sounds, smells, practices, people. The only problem is finding a frame of reference.

You don’t realize how much your culture shapes how you think about everything until you’re taken from that culture. Then you’re jarred by these places and experiences that don’t fit the mold of your thinking, how you process life. You get here and you have only a few scraps of information, a few familiar images, to set against a darkness that is simply the blankness of your own experience.

But in time, praise God, the lights go up.