Fruit from Playing the Foreigner

I had almost forgotten the heart wrenching price paid to enter the world of Spanish speakers. Remembered were all the successes, but forgotten were the early struggles. How much of a trial it was to “hang in” conversations, how awkward it was to hear people talking and only have clues about what was being said, not really knowing if my friends were really friends. Playing the foreigner is a humbling role.

Fruit is an amazingly engineered substance. Inside you will find mostly energy, stored in the form of carbohydrates. Since the tree, by design, takes in more energy from the sun than it needs for its own growth and development, it stores energy in its fruit (making them sweet). Sugars and so much more - vitamins, minerals, things that a tree has little use for but that are very useful for animals - are deposited there.

Upon returning to the US, I was done with misunderstandings, being able to speak both languages fluently; God had done His work in my soul through the humiliation of playing the foreigner. Or so I thought. Yet the veil of reverse culture shock of return was more impenetrable than that of cross culture shock of being overseas. After eleven years spent there, the world of the suburban Evangelical church in America is still a foggy mystery to me, and I to them. What use were all those years?

Recently scientists discovered anti-oxidants, chemicals that (when dissolved in blood) bind harmful free radicals, eliminating them before they can burn. Anti-oxidants are not much use in a tree, yet they abound in fruits. No doubt we will discover other previously unimagined vital (for animals) chemicals that plants produce and deposit in fruits. What need of a tree is met by producing all these chemicals?

Now, I am called anew into cross cultural situations where both the competency to discern what is going on around me and the ability to distinguish dangerous people and situations from friendly ones are lacking. And the stakes are high. The call comes from on high, day after day, over and over again, to leave my familiar English speaking environment, without any apparent corresponding capacity from on high to understand the new environment. Already having been through this type of humbling, I do not need it again for my own development, do I?

Plants and trees produce what they themselves do not need, but what is designed for consumption by others. So it is with us. We were designed to produce spiritual fruit. God’s first command to men is that we be fruitful. We are to store up and later give what was designed to sustain life in others.