Culture casserole

This is my favorite photo right now. I recently took a group of high school students to Europe. No, I haven't lost my mind, but it may have been my closest call yet. After two days of sleeping, I am just now able to put two thoughts together.The fatigue was well worth it. For me, the real payoff was not watching them climb the Eiffel tower or begin to love Gaudi's work. It wasn't seeing them FINALLY understand why verb conjugation matters as they ordered their food in another language. What I truly LOVED was watching my students change over the course of 10 days. It is one thing to read about globalization. It's another thing to BE globalized. It's one concept to make "us" ok with being around "them". It's a whole different miracle when they realize

It's all us.

I watched kids grow as they engaged a culture far different from their own. It was beautiful. One of my favorite assignments is the cultural casserole. Try to throw as many different cultures into one situation (your casserole dish) as you can.I get a kick out of this in my own life. For example, I enjoy Spanish food eaten with chopsticks while watching a movie that is a favorite in the african american community. I also like kissing my Chinese fiancee over a burrito stuffed with korean bbq. It's fun to watch students run with the concept as they eat noodles while speaking Spanish at the airport in Amsterdam or trying to find crepes in Spain.  In a world that categorizes people with drop-down menus and bubbles on a standardized test, i think it's a worthwhile endeavor to help students learn to blend and swirl as well as they sort and sift.

Have you ever seen anything more ME in your life?

Wedding Registry?

guest blogging

My sweet friend Beth asked me to guest blog from time to time on her site. How excited am I?! She even said I could use bullet-pointed lists:

• which
• I
• love

Check out the blog of one of the best wife/moms I know! http://bethwebb.typepad.com/#

Be+

I'm a be-er (pronounce be-ur..not beer).
More and more I find myself coming to terms with it. I don't mind do-ing...it just doesn't make me come alive like be-ing. Be-ing is why I like Starbucks more than their coffee. Be-ing is why I like Saturday mornings more than Saturday nights. Be-ing is why I left a chunk of my heart at a coffee-shop in Spain and not at the Prado or the Beach. Be-ing is not the absence of action...it is the abstinence from action. It is the deliberate choice to slow down and EXPERIENCE my life as it flies past rather than trying to chase the speeding train of time in hopes that it will not go so quickly if I'm running at the same pace. It is taking a  moment to reflect and write it down before I am too old to remember how it feels to be young. For me it is the BEing that leads to the BEcoming.

And yet the love of my life could not be more different. Out of love and self-sacrifice (though he'd scarce admit the agony of it) he sat with me for hours at a coffee shop last Sunday....allowing me to "be" (whatever that means!). I could see the stir-craziness in his mind as he waited ever-so patiently , hoping that at any minute I'd say "let's go DO something...ANYTHING". He, like many of those I love, is a DOer. DOing makes him come alive. It is in the DOing that he has the best ideas, feels the most accomplished, and feels the most connected to God and the rest of the world. What I find in being still, he finds in the exact opposite.

And he is not wrong for it.
Neither am I.
We were made to complement one another just as all of the BEers were born to work alongside the DOers, each showing the other a side of God (as we are all made in His image) that they we could not have previously imagined.

Shane

Shane is one of Tom's friends. We met recently at a party.At first glance, you would know that we have nothing in common.....NOTHING....and yet when asked, "What do you think of Shane?", my knee-jerk response was "We get each other"

You see, after the initial glance, Shane opened his mouth and I heard his accent. I asked where he was from and he, with the tiniest hint of reluctance, revealed that he was from a small town very similar my own- in fact just on the other side of a forest.

And there it was.  Relief.  I felt it as a flood of assumed common experiences joined our conversation. Someone standing right in front of me knew what it felt like to come from a place that thought you should never leave. He knew how it felt to always remember to muffle the accent (I could hear his watered-down drawl).
- I imagine that he had an idea of what it meant to dress differently at home than at your other home or to try with relentless hope and absolutely no success to explain "what you're doin' down there in the city" when you actually live in the suburbs.
- Without a word of conversation, I wondered if he felt like a foreigner in his hometown only to come "home" at night and feel like he could never fully morph into anything else.  I wondered if his grandparents, like mine, thought only bad people lived in the city, if he loved going home to visit, but hated seeing the hint of judgement from old friends when they ask "so where ya livin' now?" I wondered if he felt a fleeting inner exhale as he came eyeball to eyeball with someone who knew the pride and the pain of getting out and never going back.

I did.

And it's a familiar feeling, one every expat of the small town feels when they find a similar other. The feeling of being able to celebrate the leaving without having to explain that it's not in insult to those who stay. I think it's part of the reason that my cousin, Ryan, and I have become such dear friends in recent years. We are the only ones on Earth who will every fully understand where we came from AND understand why we aren't still there- a gift for sure.


I wonder how I will explain this to my own children, should I ever have them...that walking away from somewhere beautiful makes it more a part of you than ever....that staying doesn't mean betraying yourself anymore than leaving means betraying everyone else....that you will be a foreigner everywhere you go before heaven and your best best is to accept yourself knowing that you may often be the only one.