After 20 years of living in my adopted culture, I often still feel the pain of not being known or understood. No matter the effort put into learning how to live in our new culture, we will never completely fit in. And that is okay. It is more than okay. It is good. 

1 John 3 verse 1 states, “See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are. The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know him.” (ESV) 

When we step into a culture that doesn’t know Jesus, we should expect to be misunderstood, to feel unknowable. Our values, priorities, and lifestyles differ to the culture around us because every Christ follower, no matter where we live on the globe, has been adopted into the kingdom of God, whose culture starkly contradicts that of this world.

So what are we to do as global workers who feel this cultural dissonance twice over? How should we respond when our foreignness and our faith cause us to feel misunderstood and alone? 

This is when I am grateful for David’s example to us in his Psalms. He freely groans to the Lord about his troubles, sometimes even accusing God of abandoning him (see Psalms 5, 6, or 13 to name a few). It is important to cry out to our Father and to acknowledge our hurts. But, also like David, it is equally important to remember our salvation and hope in the Lord, which gives cause to rejoice and praise Him. 

Once we’ve shared our heart with God and in turn praised Him for our salvation, we can follow the example of the faithful in Hebrews 11 who looked forward to their heavenly homeland (v. 16). We, too, can look forward to God’s kingdom, the place where we will no longer feel the isolation of our foreignness. We will be fully known and understood.