Reconnecting

This last week I have reconnected with a friend that we knew from our days in Las Vegas, at Sunrise Baptist Church.  When we left Las Vegas for Japan, our friends had gotten married and had graduated from seminary at Golden Gate.  We were in Japan for 13 ½ years, and our friends had pursued the Lord’s leading in their lives too.  That led them to missions work in old parts of Europe.

He taught in a seminary there and did translation work for books to be used in his seminary, and pastoring, and … well, everything that missionaries do.  Their children were born there, and are third culture kids, just as ours are.  

There is something special about third culture kids.  They were strangers in a strange land while they were “over there,” but they also missed out on more than a decade of their formative years of American culture.  The things other people their age experienced, they missed out on.  On the other hand, they have multicultural experiences from the host country that American inculcated people know nothing about.  Who would understand “You don’t see what you don’t look at,” if you never went to a public bath house?  Who would understand driving on the “wrong side of the road,” if you were never in a foreign location, not under Americanization?  Why would anyone want to go about the house in sock feet, or bare foot, if they never lived where shoes were “dirty” and tracked mud into the house if they were not dumped in the genkon, or mud room?  Who would think to BYOTP (bring your own toilet paper) in a public place?  Or that bicycles are the accepted mode of transportation, because gasoline is too expensive, and public transportation is how EVERYONE gets around.

Anyway, the old friends are back in America, as are we.  They are pastoring a church, as are we.  They have kids that are just younger than ours, ours are adults now.  It’s good to reconnect, when the connection was so good in the beginning!