One of the fun parts of going overseas? Glimpsing new avatars of your family members—new delicious bits of God’s glory, you could say. 

My husband, for example, wowed me with his ability to step up. He took it upon himself to begin creating our map of Kampala—driving around so we could confidently navigate the unlabeled, coily streets. He took charge of nailing down the right cell phone carrier and phones that would work. He calmly steered through traffic that would give some people an aneurysm. 

Over years, I watched his generosity unfurl in ways I could have never witnessed in America; turns out we’d previously had no need to buy a goat for someone’s funeral. 

My then-two-year-old, too, became our social ambassador with his sunny personality. His pizazz unleashed in East Africa’s uber-relational culture. We now know wherever he goes, makes fans. 

But I also learned the breadth of God’s beauty. I saw people who worshipped him in ways I’d never seen: To this day, very little can swell my heart like Africans praising at full volume with their native drums. 

I also learned it can look entirely different for people to honor their father and mother. To tell someone the Gospel. To be a strong woman after his heart. 

I also learned that flexibility in even what I’d previously considered “right” and “wrong” needed to broaden to meet the Bible’s terms. I had to reexamine Pharisaical, culturally-narrow ideas of how things must be. 

When I saw the grocery-store employee sleeping on a crate in the aisle, I initially thought: lazy. But what if, along with the maybe-or-maybe-not paycheck, I was the one sleeping on the ground in a noisy, dangerous neighborhood? What if I served 12 hours as a night guard as my second job while attending classes for a better shot at supporting my family? 

Could that person actually be hardworking, and caught in a moment of exhaustion (…like me falling asleep in the sermon in my first trimester)? 

My hard-and-fast judgment—maybe sweetly called “discernment”—actually has prevented me at times from witnessing God’s beauty and glory in others. A beauty that’s different from his Western, female, middle-class image in me. 

What avatars of his glory could I be missing?