What I learned living cross culturally as a Christian

I have lived cross-culturally almost my entire life. Born in Taiwan, I knew one language, one culture, and one worldview until I was introduced to the strange habits of the West at age 10. As my tongue adjusted to swirling out two diverse languages, I began to know life only by straddling both the worlds of the East and the West. I was raised cross-culturally, married cross-culturally, worked cross-culturally, and am raising my kids cross-culturally. Some days I feel fractured and fragmented, but mostly I am grateful to be privileged with an unique vantage point. Like I have been given two sets of spectacles in a world where most people wear one.

It has been complicated, to say the least, navigating my faith with my two sets of spectacles. When I was introduced to the Christian faith, many of the habits felt awkward: standing up and walking down the aisle to pledge my allegiance, praying out loud, and singing lots of songs about loving God, which felt totally irreverent coming from a culture where the word love was reserved only for romance. I thought all these habits felt strange, like clothes that didn’t fit quite right, because I was a new believer, new to the ways of Jesus. But that was only part of the reason. As a child, I hadn’t yet perfected the skill of switching my spectacles. My teachers who taught me how to be Christian wore one set of lenses and I imitated them wearing a different set. By the time I learned how to wear the western lenses, the habits of being Christian no longer felt weird, it was natural.

We all wear a set of spectacles. Everyone does. Those lenses dictate the way we view life. They determine the habits we make, what to eat, when to sleep, when to marry, and how to work. They assign value to our lives, determining what is meaningful: family, faith, honor, love.