"Internationals"

Photo caption: Not a people group

At the conference I attended this last week four men were asked to represent the "majority world harvest force," which is current jargon for the mission movement that has grown up (from practically nothing before the 1980s) in Asia, India, Africa, and Latin America. Nowadays there are way more of "them" than of us, which is as it should be - notwithstanding we all bring something to the table.

The guy representing Asia was from the Philippines. He knew he had a hard job to try to represent Asia. Just representing China would be difficult - or just Indonesia. Some of the other countries are a bit more homogeneous, but you certainly can't average them all together and come out with something meaningful and say this is what Asians are like.

Somehow the way my brain is mapped, this connected with something I ran into in my travels this summer.

When I showed up for my first visit to the research team in "River City," they let me know they had described me as their teacher and that it might be a good idea to allude to other places I had lived and done research. They felt this would help my credibility and, by extension, theirs. As a result of the "teacher" title (and/or my advanced age, relatively speaking?) I was thereafter treated as the most honorable member of the party.

But when I started chatting about other places I'd been, as I had been encouraged to do, I realized I was falling back on a misplaced assumption... that these folks were "internationals." That because they were interested in hearing about me (a person from America) and talking about themselves (people from this particular city and culture) they would have some interest in other parts of the world as well.

But they didn't. In most cases their eyes glazed over fairly quickly if I got off on some tangent about something I'd experienced or learned in India, or Central Asia. Once, when I spoke about to a visit to Tun'isia, my bright, educated host admitted he didn't realize it was an Arab Muslim country.

Just because we meet people in other countries (or from other countries), that doesn't make them "international." They may identify with only one nation, their own. And in kindness or curiosity they might express interest in yours as well. Whether it goes beyond that really depends on the person.