Almost five years ago I packed up my small life in Australia and moved to South East Asia. I arrived fresh off the plane with a picture in my head of what life would look like, but no real idea of what to expect.
Everything was foreign and completely new. I loved it all!
I loved learning to drive a motorbike, eating street food and attempting words and questions in this language that was alien to me. I loved how different everything was compared to where I had come from.
Loving the culture!
There was so much that made me smile. Seeing four teenage boys squashed onto one moto, legs dangling everywhere. Leaving dinner and having to scramble through a pile of 40 flip flops left outside the door to find my shoes. Menus offering mistranslated options like ‘boiled egg-children’.
Once I looked up from trying to unlock my apartment gate to see a man in everyday clothes riding backwards on a moto holding an arm full of rifles. Another time I spent an hour at a printing shop watching two cheeky teenagers on a computer trying to photoshop cheques in plain view of whoever cared to notice.
Life was funny and different and frequently disorienting. I often felt like Alice having fallen down a hotter and rather less technicolored rabbit hole.
The difficulties in sharing my experience
The thing with travels though, is that it’s a topic much like dreams. We find our own fascinating. Other people’s? Not so much!
I understood this, yet I still so badly wanted people to understand my new life and to feel what I felt for this country! To see its beauty and understand its complexities. To appreciate the frustrations and hardships and deep joys of living and working cross-culturally.
One of my favourite things when I returned home was to talk with people who were genuinely interested in my new world. People who would go beyond the easy surface questions and small talk. I truly appreciate the many people who over the years have patiently listened to my stories of life overseas!
The beauty of being known and loved
Wherever we live and whatever our life looks like, we all have a deep desire to be understood. It’s a fundamental part of feeling being loved. We all want to feel like the people in our life ‘get us’. Tim Keller once wrote, ‘To be loved but not known is comforting but superficial. To be known and not loved is our greatest fear. But to be fully known and truly loved is, well, a lot like being loved by God. It is what we need more than anything.’
Sometimes it can be hard for others, even our closest friends or family, to do this. There are some situations and experiences (both good and bad) where even the best intentions can’t help the people we love to understand what we’re going through. Or we get so confused that we don’t even know how we feel, to be able to share it with others! Yet God always understands. In Psalm chapter 139 David writes, ‘I’m an open book to you; even from a distance, you know what I’m thinking. You know when I leave and when I get back; I’m never out of your sight. You know everything I’m going to say before I start the first sentence.’ How incredible is that?
Tim Keller says that being loved by God, is to be fully known and truly loved.
God is not a distant stranger. He knows our every emotion, our deepest fears and our hidden dreams. He understands the complexities of our unique personalities. The longer I’ve lived overseas, in a different culture where it’s easy to feel disconnected from ‘home’, the more I appreciate that I am truly loved and fully understood by God.
Anna hails from Australia but lives and works in south east Asia. She enjoys travel, good coffee and getting to hang out with awesome people from around the world.
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