Change Reaction
Then the one seated on the throne said, “Look! I’m making all things new.” He also said, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.” (Revelation 21:5, CEB translation)
Uh, seriously, God! Do you have to make ALL things new?!?!?! What if I don’t want those words to be trustworthy and true? There are times when I don’t want things to change. I want things to stay old and familiar. Comfortable. Easy.
I have felt that way many times in my life. Like when I was in Denmark. I traveled there as the Study Abroad Advisor for the University of Arkansas to meet the heads of a program we had a longstanding relationship with. I was staying with a host mother to experience what our students experienced. She had showed me where to catch the bus. She had showed me how to make breakfast and how to pack my lunch because she had to leave early in the morning. So the next morning, still recovering from jetlag, I began an adventure that turned into a bad punch line. I could not slice the bread. My whole life I had only had pre-sliced bread. It turns out slicing soft bread is a skill. So I ended up with a pile of bread pieces, including one that I thought would make somewhat decent toast. The rest I smashed up against the meatloaf for lunch to make an approximate sandwich. Then I went to make toast and I could not get the toaster to work. After 10 minutes of not understanding how I couldn’t make toast (seriously?!?!?), I discovered the toaster wasn’t plugged in. Again, in my family of origin, the toaster is always plugged in. Who unplugs their toaster?!?! (Turns out, a lot of people, especially Europeans who are far more attentive to electricity use than Americans tend to be).
I managed to catch the bus, made it downtown to the central station, then set out to find the American Express office to cash travelers checks (I am really dating myself with this story – Millennials have got to be laughing heartily at this point because they know how to slice bread and probably unplug their toasters and have never used travelers checks, but let me remind you to respect your elders). I know how to use a map. I am periodically directionally challenged, but I was finding all the markers on the map, just no American Express office. After almost 2 hours wandering, I found the University of Copenhagen, which was where I needed to be at 2 p.m. that day, but I was afraid that was all I was going to be able to find. I was pretty sure I was going to live the rest of my life on these stairs in front of the university. If I couldn’t read a map, then there was no way I would find my way back to the airport. I guess I am a Dane now. Well, at least as long as my smashed approximate sandwich would sustain me. After that, who knows?
I sat down to cry.
And then the thought crossed my mind. “You know what this is? This is culture shock. I know this. I have trained more than 600 people about this. I have taught them to recognize it. And I have taught them to overcome it. If I can’t get up and handle this, then no one can.”
And so I stood up, took a bite of my weird meatloaf sandwich, and headed to the meeting I needed to find. I found it, with 10 minutes to spare. And later that night, in the dark with no visible clues, I got off the bus at the correct stop and thanked my host mother for giving me all I needed to make it through the day.
We are all in the middle of living in an unfamiliar culture. Everyday life is now full of surprises like bread that has to be sliced (or toilet paper that has to be scavenged for), a world where we glove and mask up just to drive down the block to the grocery store. And those of us preparing to serve a new church will continue to navigate new cultures in the many, many months to come. And the church will be trying to figure out what our culture is on the other side of quarantine. There will be layers upon layers of managing culture shock ahead. I know much has been written about the stages of grief, and that is a useful paradigm for this moment. But I have been grateful that my training as a study abroad advisor has given me the knowledge of the pattern of culture shock, because it encompasses the reality of any change, not just changes that center around loss. Any change, positive or negative, involves acclimating to a new culture. In service to all of us confronting change right now, and especially for those churches and pastors who will navigate pastoral change in the midst of this moment, I am going to share in this blog the stages of culture shock, referred to as the 5 H’s of Culture Shock. In the next blog, I will share the mechanisms you need in place to manage culture shock.
One quick note, though. I will write about this as if it were a linear process, but it is really not. You can move back and forth and around all the stages. Also, remember if you are navigating multiple changes at once, you will experience multiple stages at any given time. For instance, if you are in quarantine trying to homeschool your kids and you have lost your job, you have at least three new cultures stacked on top of each other at once. Be kind to yourself in this reality.
The 5 H’s of Culture Shock
· Honeymoon – This is the moment of thrill and excitement of the new culture that is before you. It is stepping off the airplane into the foreign country you have always wanted to visit. It is taking the hands of the person you have always wanted to marry and saying, “I do.” It is in the relief you feel when your loved one who has suffered too long finally lets go and passes away. It is the high in quitting a job you have hated too long. The Honeymoon stage is full of exhilaration, excitement, even some anxiety about the adventure before you. There is also a tendency in this stage to see everything as shiny, new, and as close to perfect as you can get. Any blemishes are ignored or seen as charming. All is beautiful, rainbows and unicorns.
· Homesickness – Sometimes this stage hits right alongside honeymoon. Sometimes it is months out. It usually gets triggered the first time you try to do something that was easy in your home culture, but now has its difficulties. My students who studied in Great Britain who had this mistaken idea that the speak English, or who tried to cross the street and looked the wrong way for cars, were predictable for moving into homesickness. It happened to me when I tried to buy laundry detergent in France and I suddenly realized I was prepared to analyze a complicated poem in French but didn’t know the word for bleach. Right now it is in having to remember all the new steps to everything, like spraying Lysol on the mail or opening your passenger window while someone drops communion in your car. Or when you can’t hug your aunt but instead have to give her a peace sign. And for those of us moving to new churches it is in not knowing how to say goodbye. Or how to say hello either. In the homesickness stage, you would give about anything for things to feel “normal” again. Normal, by the way, is however your old culture did things. Normal is incredibly relative.
· Hostility – Been wickedly pissed off lately? Welcome to the hostility stage. Railing against how unfair all this is, spitting fury on the new way of life and the people who seem to be perfectly happy with it… yeah, that’s hostility. My guess is most of us pastors have been recipients of a fair amount of hostility as our people have raged at the idea that we would close the church doors. Or maybe you have raged at the idea that you have been told to close the church doors. Some are furious that they have lost jobs because a few thousand people have died. Oh the hostility stage. Full on rejection of the way of life that is before us. When I was in the first few months of a pastoral change, I hit this stage in the middle of a Target store. I couldn’t find trash cans. I felt like I had been up and down every aisle in the store, but I knew they had to sell trash cans, and yet I did not have one in my basket now, did I? I also knew, with absolute certainty, that if I was at the Walmart in my previous town, I would walk right in and go straight to the aisle with the trash cans. I was right on the verge of crashing my cart through displays just so someone would see me and know I was in trouble and care. That’s a whole lot of rage over a trash can. I wasn’t really mad about the trash can. I was just mad. Nothing works the way it should. There is too much I don’t understand. There is too much to process. I used to say that if more of our students could figure out how to get back to the airport and afford a ticket home, we would have lost practically every student who studied abroad as soon as they hit the hostility stage. This is not the best stage. Good news is, it is normal. The other good news is it tends to walk hand-in-hand with the next stage, which is…
· Humor – The humor stage helps make the hostility stage bearable. Usually you start out making fun of the new culture. It is why memes are so therapeutic right now. It is a natural way for humans to cope with things. It’s why people laugh in funerals. We need that release of laughter, even when it is edged with a bit of bitterness or sarcasm or anger. Eventually, as our comfort with the new culture grows, we move from making fun of the new culture, to having inside jokes with those we are transitioning alongside, to laughing with the new culture. Getting the jokes is a mark of fluency and comfort. It is a healing stage in helping us find the joy in our new way of life. If we can laugh together, we can live together.
· Home(less) – This last stage is the stage of acclimation. You are now as comfortable in this culture as you were in the one you left. In fact, returning to the one you left is disorienting. It doesn’t feel as much like home as it once did. It is a bit like when you return to your childhood home, and everything seems so much smaller than it was in your memory. You are not the same person anymore. You have been changed because you have encountered and succeeded at navigating a new way of living. But in some ways, you are always an immigrant, because the new culture is not totally home for you, but the old one isn’t any more either. This transformation makes you into more than either culture is. Neither can fully contain who you are. From the standpoint of faith, I think we become more and more homeless as we encounter more and more of God’s world, and more of the ways the image of God is reflected in this world. It makes us all the more fit for our true home, which is a life awaiting us in the fullness of the reign of God. I remind myself of this as I prepare to face another pastoral transition. With this transition before me, I will learn to love more fully because there will be more people to love. I will learn to see more fully because there will be more ways of seeing. I will learn to hope more abundantly, because there will be more expressions of hope. I will know more of God because I will know more of God’s world.
It is a beautiful thing, this transformation. God really is making all things new. Eventually. But that doesn’t mean the road to get there is always easy. Sometimes you subsist on smashed, cold, approximate sandwiches. Sometimes, you never find the American Express office (turns out, it closed a couple years before – something my paper map did not show – and Millennials this was before cell phones, so quit your laughing). The journey is not always easy, but the burden can be made a little lighter. For that piece, come back next week and see where the path leads us…
Photo by Luis Galvez on Unsplash
