A fun part of going overseas? Seeing new layers of my family. 

I had no idea my daughter could play with people of any race or socioeconomic status. I’d never seen my husband’s generosity so abundant, or his courage in navigating a new culture.  

As C.S. Lewis remarked in The Four Loves when his friend Charles died, he lost part of his friend Ronald then, too. Only Charles could display Ronald in certain ways they reacted to one another. 

How much more could beholding another image-bearing culture blow the doors off our knowledge of God? 

I witnessed an entirely different side of God in Ugandan culture–not to mention refugee friends from Eritrea, Ethiopia, and North Sudan. 

Similarly, cross-cultural worker to India Charles Freer Adams wrote, 

Since I have learnt to know Christ afresh in this Eastern setting, it has been easy for me to point out the weaknesses of the portraiture when His character has been depicted with only Western ideals to draw from, as though these comprehended the ‘fullness of the Christ’. For in such pictures the true proportion has not been kept. … Much has been lost. Some day I would like to draw His likeness anew, with the colour of the Eastern sky added to the scene. 

Andrews points out Jesus was born very near “the concourse of the two great streams of human life in the ancient world, that flowed East and West”.*  

It’s as if God has taken jigsaw puzzle pieces of Himself, shaken them, and scattered them throughout every culture, in every era. The more cultures we intimately understand (…or don’t), the more of him we’re able to piece together (…or not). 

Our Creator, Savior, and Master is the unifying image.  

After all—the unity of the human body, too isn’t because of the sameness of its parts. It’s their unity of purpose, and the graceful, coordinated direction by a single head.  

Andrews continues,  

….The supreme miracle of Christ’s character lies in this: that He combines within Himself, as no other figure in human history has ever done, the qualities of every race. 

….For those who, through intimate contact with other races, have gained the right to be heard, have borne witness that each race and region of the earth responds to His appeal… His sovereign character has become the one golden thread running through mankind, binding the ages and the races together.* 

Together, we look like Him. 

*In Baillie, John, ed. A Diary of Readings. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons (1955), Day 23.