Making Comparisons

At Inca Link, we speak to short-term teams about five stages of reverse culture shock - the process of returning from a mission trip to your home culture.  The stages are:

1. Fun - the honeymoon of enjoying all the things you missed about home
2. Flee - you enjoyed the mission culture so much you miss it and feel like you don't fit in at home
3. Fight - you get angry at your home for not being more like the mission field
4. Fit In - it becomes impossible to keep standing and fighting, so you give up and return to "normal"
5. Fruit - as you learn and process, you begin to bear fruit based on your experiences

Each of the first four stages are almost guaranteed, and they all have a common theme.  They are based on the process of making comparisons.  Comparisons aren't unusual or necessarily bad.  They are how we make sense of the world and what is happening around us.  We compare one thing to another thing that we know, and it allows us to understand it.  During reverse culture shock, we're making tons of comparisons.  We are comparing things at home to things in the foreign country, those around us to those we knew in the mission field, and even ourselves in one place to ourselves in another place.  That's natural, but it leads us directly into making value judgments and deciding which is better than the other.

When we elevate one to the status of "better," we are in trouble.  In the field, there were certain things that were better about home, and that leads to the "Fun" stage.  When you get home, things were better back in the field, and that leads to "Flee" and "Fight."  In "Fit In," you tire of the comparisons and give up, regretfully remembering how good things were "over there."  I believe that these comparisons end up causing us to divorce the two worlds, separated by a long plane flight, and that immediately allows our minds to divorce what we learned and how we grew from who we are at home.  Game over, you never reach stage 5.

Short-term trips unfortunately lend themselves to all sorts of these comparisons, because you haven't been in the foreign country long enough to settle into a new "normal" where the comparisons cease.  I believe it's important, however, to try to avoid them from the start.  When you first transition from one culture to another, everything seems strange.  It's important to try to avoid the "strange" categorization and the comparisons and simply see the things in their own context.  For me, it helps to remember that there is one constant throughout - I am the same person moving around on the earth.  I'm continually growing and changing through my experiences, but it's still me.  I try not to be overwhelmingly different in one place versus another, to help avoid making comparisons.  It's all one big earth, and there are a variety of different contexts.  Each exists simultaneously, and none is better or worse than another.  They're just different contexts.

This viewpoint helps to avoid culture value judgments too, by the way.  It helps us to serve cross-culturally with sensitivity.  It also helps to avoid the huge shocks of highs and lows - it's common to get upset at the wealth back home, or to get upset at the poverty in the foreign country.  People back home often say, "You know there's poor people here at home, too!", to which missionaries often talk about how much worse the poverty is in the foreign country.  They have a good point, though - poverty exists everywhere, and it's best to avoid comparison judgments.  The context is different, but the Biblical commands the same.  If you serve the poor in a foreign country, but don't much think about the poor at home, it can't be said of you that you have compassion on the poor.

The things we learn on the mission field can serve us back at home.  They are different contexts, but that's okay.  We can keep that in mind and not make unhealthy separations between places, people, and things.  Avoiding too many comparisons, and especially value judgments, will help to avoid culture shock on both ends of a mission trip.