A Dwelling Place

Where do I belong?

This is a question that has been creeping up in me over the past few weeks.

a view of Kalimpong

I left the states eight months ago as someone other than who I am now. Time changes you. Foreign culture changes you. Life changes you. 

If I am not the person who left the states, when I return will I still belong there? Of course my family (and bestest friends) will accept me and love me, but what about everyone else. And will I ever really belong in in passport country once I have spent so much time away? Do I even want to belong there anymore?

Since October when I arrived in hilly Kalimpong I have been trying to figure out where I belong here and make a place for myself. My place has been my cozy room, "Miss Sarah" to Manju and Jeewan Loy. It has also been "sathi/friend" "didi/older-sister" or "bhieny/younger-sister" to many people here. 

a wall in my cozy room

One thing that I look back and want to change is that I wish I could have plunged in more deeply to the culture here. There are more foreigners in this little city than I can count on all my fingers and toes. I have met pretty much all of them, and they are great people, but they are who I have spent the most time with. It has been wonderful to learn about what missionary family-life looks like, but I would like to have learned more first hand about the culture also. Now don't get me wrong. I have learned quite a lot, probably more than I realize. 

 What I would love to have is a feeling of belonging within the culture. There are two prongs that come against this desire. First: cultural/language learning would have had to the focus of my time here. Second: cultures like the Indian/Nepali culture are deeply reticent to allow anyone from outside to ever become "part of the group." If it is even possible to become "part of the group," to belong here, if would have to take years or even decades of dedication and self-sacrifice. I have been here long enough to realize that I don't belong, but not long enough to think about ever belonging. 

This is such a hard thing. Over the past few months I grown a love for these people-of-the-hills as I have lived on top of their hills. Their hills are beautiful. They are beautiful. Their faces draw me into wanting to know what is behind the brown eyes that are nestled midst the soft brown skin of their round expression.
It is a tough thing to know that I will never belong. 

Sister at a Distance

But then I remember that this earth (and its people) are not our true home. We are made for a heavenly kingdom and not any earthly one. 

Some ladies and I were talking about this issue of belonging and our concept of "home" after living in a foreign country. One of the ladies shared this verse: 

"Lord, you have been my dwelling place (home) throughout all transitions." Psalm 90:1 

this world is not our home

I am discovering the richness in not "belonging" in any particular culture. 

It is so beautifully true. The Lord is our home and his Spirit is our dwelling place, no matter how many transitions our life takes us through. 

I am not fully American, nor am I fully something else. 

No matter how much color I am smeared with I am still white.

I hope that I am becoming something more like what Sherwood Lingerfelter calls in his book "Ministering Cross-Culturally," a 150-percent person, someone who is 75-percent their passport culture (which means becoming less than 100-percent) and also becomes 75-percent their ministry target culture (which he acknowledges that you can never become 100-percent). He calls this the "incarnational model for personal relationships," and reminds us that as Jesus became incarnate, fully man to reach men, and that is how we should approach cross-cultural ministry (24). 

There is a beautiful stretching when this happens. You become less of what you were and maybe more of what God intended you to be. This is Kingdom culture. 

"So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit." Ephesians 2:19-22

I will never be their beautiful brown but I want my hands to touch them like Jesus.

The Real India: Life of Luxury

India is a huge country stretching from Pakistan all the way across to Myanmar and ranging from China and the Himalayan Mountains down to steamy Sri Lanka which almost brushes the equator. There are 28 states each with its own culture, language, history, and struggles. Even a native of India can only see their dynamic country through one pair of eyes and set of experiences. So the quest for the “true India” seems quite impossible and illusive. Once you begin to understand something about this culture, you discover something that throws a monkey wrench in your original hypothesis. This was really true during my trip to Delhi in February.

Flying into the Delhi airport felt like I was coming home, back to the familiar. When I am not in Delhi I crave when the plane I am on begins the decent into the Gangetic plain and I know that I will see my Asha family soon. This trip was different because my primary reason for coming to Delhi was something other than spending as much time as possible at Asha House. I did get to spend some beautiful moments at Asha House, but the focus of this trip was different. I was primarily there to be a support to a friend who was there to do some battle with the Indian bureaucracy. Because we needed to be in closer proximity to the government offices, we stayed with different people my friend knew in South Delhi and Gurgoan. This was not the part of Delhi I knew.

South Delhi is transversed by wide roads lined with lush greenery, and divided up in tidy sectors named with the letters of the English alphabet. In these cozy sectors you can find apartments and houses with gardens out front along quiet streets. The luxury cars (lot of imported Hondas) parked outside are meticulously being washed by the owner's hired driver. Just around the block is shopping area where you can get groceries, vegetables, photocopies, school books, and anything else you might need. Even though it is walking distance most people can afford Rs.10 to take a auto-rickshaw ride. If you are too lazy for even that you don't even have to leave your house. All you have to do is call up the store and they will deliver everything from rice and potatoes, to chicken, to potato chips and cold drinks (Indian English for soda). You also are able to order delivery of any kind of cuisine thinkable: Italian, Mediterranean, Chinese, McDonald’s, Domino’s, North Eastern Indian, South Indian, and the typical Northern Indian fare. In this neighborhood there are no beggars on the streets or dirty children playing in the dust. There is a gated play ground for the children of the neighborhood to play in with monkey bars, swings, and slides all painted cheerfully.

I don't know exactly when it started hitting me, the fact that the Delhi I knew was not the one I was experiencing, but if definitely hit me that I was in another world when I stepped into DFL Place Mall. This is actually one of three super luxurious malls that are built almost on top of each other. The only way you can tell that you are going into a different mall is because you have to go through a security check when you cross from one mall to the other. It is like having three malls larger and fancier than South Park right on top of each other. The other two are called Select Citywalk, and MGF Metropolitan Mall. Google it if you don't believe me. Honestly I had a hard time believing my own eyes. THREE luxury malls.... why in the world? May in Dubai but not in Delhi.

My friend and I were at DFL Place to meet up with someone. We were staying at someone's house in South Delhi so this mall was a convenient meeting place. We got there a little early to wander around and get some ice cream. I found a frozen yogurt place (what is a luxury mall without frozen yogurt?) and was pursuing the menu overwhelmed by the Western amount of options, when a young girl pushed her way past me right to the counter, literally pushed me. Flouncing her hair and adjusting her designer bag she tried ordering the largest thing on the menu for her and her boyfriend. The guy behind the counter seemed embarrassed because of her actions and helped me first because I was technically next, but the girl tried thrusting her handful of Rupees toward him to try to get served first. In my head I was wondering if this was really happening and what I should do. I would expect this sort of thing from the Delhi that I knew before. In this country everyone pushes and shoves to get what they need. There are no tidy queues(lines) unless there are police to enforce them. Even with this there is usually some extra courtesy shown to foreigners. I am not saying that I deserve extra special treatment, but I didn't expect to be treated so very rudely especially by a female and one much younger than I am, and on top of that inside a mall that seemed the pinnacle of “civilized India.” This girl seemed to think the world revolved around her. I thought that was a western thing... maybe it came as a bonus with her designer purse. I got yogurt but my head was too much in a whirl of culture shock to really enjoy it.

The entire mall (really malls) experience was the most culture shock I have been through so far. At first I thought it was reverse culture shock (because these malls were so western), but I am not quite sure that was quite it. This was still India, but such a totally different India than I ever expected to experience. Since being in Delhi I have read a book called,“The Beautiful and The Damned: Life in the New India,” by Siddhartha Deb. In this book Deb examines the lives of businessmen, farmers, activists, and women in this country that is so rapidly changing. This man who lived for quite some time in NYC and seen western self-centeredness there, gives his own account of wandering around DFL Place Mall:

“ I was still wondering why I had been unable to enter the Paul Smith store. I didn't normally go to designer stores but when I had ventured into some of them in New York out of curiosity, I hadn't felt such unease. Somehow, I was more exposed and vulnerable in Delhi. This wasn't because it would be apparent to everyone in the shop that I couldn't afford to buy anything- because that would be pretty obvious in Manhattan too but it mattered to me in Delhi that people would know, as if the very objects would sneer at me for daring to enter their space. In the West, with its long excess of capitalism, it might be possible to scoff at luxury brands. They had been around so long that they had lost some of their meaning. But in India, luxury brands still possessed power” (Deb, 240)

Reading this hit on the head what I had been feeling. I felt out of place not because everything around me was reminiscent of the excess of the West but because because there was a strange pride and power that oozed from every shop, kiosk, escalator, display, and the people who strolled around wearing designer clothing and shopping bags emblazoned with luxury labels on their arms.

The India I knew was one of the orphan, the leper, the beggar, the persecuted pastor, the struggling family; the India of the people who appear as a faceless nameless mass to the people cavorting in DFL Place. I knew in theory that the India of leisure and luxury existed, but to see it with my own eyes, to smell the sickly perfume with my own nose, to feel the perfectly cold AC on my own skin, to taste its delicacies with my own tongue, was something quite unnerving.

Work Cited:

Deb, Siddhartha.“The Beautiful and The Damned: Life in the New India.” Viking by Penguin Books India. 2001  

The Real India: Intro

If you have been keeping track of me and my blog posts for the past 6 months, I am sure that you have been disappointed by the general lack of exposition on Kalimpong, India, and what I am observing about both.

In a tourist guide to India I read last year it said something like “the more you know about India the less you understand.” This has been very true of my experiences the past months. The more I see and learn, the more realize that I cannot fully know of understand this country or its many peoples.

I haven't written much about of my insights or observations on India and its culture on this blog yet because I feel ill-equipped and unqualified to do so. I am looking at things here through the dimly lit kaleidoscopic lens of being a foreigner in this place, I get glimpses of the dark and light of reality but they are all jumbled up and out of context in my perception. What furthers this handicap is my experiences are quite shallow. I feel that in this cozy house, 

tucked up on the mountain side, 

surrounded by a fences, 

buffered by school grounds and the principles house and gardens, 

which rarely looses power or has water problems, 

where I eat dahl and rice made by our cook for lunch,

but am treated to American dinners and baked goodies in the evenings, 

that I haven't earned a right or a place to comment on the culture and country that I am living in.

The garden in the front of our compound

Though I feel unqualified to comment at all, I am still going to attempt to share with you what I am learning about this strange wild beautiful country I am living in.

Check back for posts in a series I am calling “The Real India”  

Being Myself

Again I am sitting down to blog, but there is so much floating around in my head that I am not sure where to begin except to just type. 

I like having things worked out before I say them. I am realizing that I have a propensity to do the same for the other types of communication as well. I don't really have anything "worked-out" right now. No nice conclusion to get to or theme to follow. Except that God is urging me, in his gentlemanly way, to get out of my comfort zone yet again. 

Be yourself.

That is what I keep feeling and hearing. But why is this so hard? I guess there is always room for another existential crisis, but I thought I had gone through enough of those in college to have figured out who I am already. 

What I have known for a long time is that I have people pleasing tendencies. Almost without thinking I try to be what people want me to be, and do what people what me to do. I usually don't exactly know what people want, but I assume. Often I am right on, but more recently I have been wrong, hurting myself and others in my folly. 

This probably all is being compounded because right now as I am living in another culture. I cannot just assume that people understand me or my motives for doing things. It causes me to think, not just the usual twice before I do things, but I now have to think three times in hopes to prevent offence or misunderstanding.  

I have learned a good deal about Indian and Nepali cultures, but even still I am running off assumptions. One thing I do know is that it is very rare to get a straight answer from people especially if you have offended them. So I have just been keeping my head down and trying to mind my own business. But is that really being myself?

I want deep connections here, but I feel like I cannot ever hope to earn a place in this culture. I want to speak out, especially to the challenge the church, but where do I even begin as I am an outsider who will never be allowed to be an insider. There is so much injustice, so much dishonesty, and such a disparity between the rich and the poor. So much need for the Kingdom to come on earth as it is in heaven. 

I guess it comes back to prayer. Prayer is the very first step to changing things. The next is a radical pure life lived as an example. This is all we can really do. But there is no way to measure our progress or our proximity to the goal. The goal is completely out of our reach. 

Why are the simple things so hard to really accept and to really do? If I really accept this then all my big expectations of changing the world, seeing revival sweep over India, seeing hundreds of children snatched from the fires of hell and given loving homes, and seeing the church really act like the Bride of Christ can never be realized as my imagination has painted them. 
Do I give up these dreams? I think that would kill me. 
Do I keep up the delusion and live a life of appointment? Sounds fun. Not. 
Do I dream smaller? Maybe. 

But it is still painful to realize that all my dreams and desires for my life might come to nothing. Maybe that is the problem, that they are all MY dreams and desires.   

I have been praying that God would give me the desires of his heart. Maybe this is what He is doing... stripping me of my desires and replacing them with His; stripping me of my expectations for my life so He can give me His own expectations. 

Who has God made me to be? What had He made me to do? I thought I knew, but now I honestly don't have many answers. 

"Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart." Psalm 37:4 

I guess all that I can do is keep trusting in this promise the Lord has made and wait for Him to fulfill it.  

Your Normal is Not Really Normal

I think I am going through pre-culture shock.

There is something rising up in me that is saying "your normal is not really the goal. I am setting before you a new goal." 

I hate admitting this but there is something deep inside of me that expects and craves the American version of "normal:"
the sweet pretty wedding with all the family and friends there celebrating (and gifting),
the husband who goes off to work five days a week,
weekends,
house full of kids with beds, toys, and cute clothes enough for all,
a place to craft and somewhere to buy supplies,
grocery stores down the street,
Super-Target,
a vehicle to take the family places,
the library,
instagram,
internet everywhere,
coffee every morning,
an oven to bake things in,
a couch in the living room,
carpet on the floor,
air-conditioning in the summer,
heat in the winter,
fall leaves,
spring flowers,
closest family and friends within 3000 miles.....
this might all be just a dream that I have to let go.

India is tugging at my heart. The Lord is calling my name.
It is impossible to say "no."

In September I am going to India. I will stay nine months (well that is the plan so far). This time I will not just be visiting: playing with the kids at Asha House, drinking tea with lepers, buying some pretty stuff, and leaving. This time I am going to have to set down some roots, continuing the journey of learning how to live in India.

There are many unknowns about what the next year holds for me. I know that I cannot approach them with fear but with faith, trusting that God really truly knows what I need better than I think I do, trusting that his way will lead to his glory and my good.

But this process is still a tearing. Tearing down the old "normal" replacing it with the Kingdom normal. Tearing down my expectations and replacing them with Kingdom expectations.

Oh but I am so selfish and full of pride. It is not easy. In fact it is really convenient to believe the lie that tells me that I will loose my true self in this process. But it is just a lie. The amazing truth is that I am finding my true self in giving myself over to The Lover of My Soul. The Author of Life, The Older (and so much wiser) Brother over All Creation.

I am going to India nothing can stop me. I am always going to say "yes!" to God no matter the cost, even if the cost is a little heartache.