I'm in Australia with He Qi, about to preach at Immanuel College's 9:30 service on a Sunday when the world is supposed to end at 10:30. If it all comes to an end before I get my Tim-Tams at coffee hour, I will be greatly disappointed.
Here's a thought for the morning on the perspectives we get from travel, adding new friends from other cultures, and exposing ourselves to ideas, thoughts, and people beyond our safe little worlds:
If we stay in one place (politically, intellectually, physically), we see things only from the one point. A single point allows you to see things from only one perspective.
The moment you add a second point (a new friend from a different culture, a new spice to your recipe palate, a new experience living in a different culture, etc.), you now can move along a continuum. You are still stuck in a two-dimentional world, but at least you can move.
The moment you add a third point, things get interesting. You are still on a flat plain, but the new friends can relate to eachother, the new thoughts can bounce up against themselves - not just you. The new spices can interact with each other. You can move both up and down, and left and right. You can see from many new perspectives. (Although, you're still stuck in two dimensions geometrically if you only have three points.)
Once you add a fourth point, everything changes. You are now in three dimensions. You move from the additive, to the multiplicative. The more toys you throw into the intellectual toy box from here on out, the more quantum leaps you can take in conversations, understandings, perspectives, insights.
You still come from somewhere. You still have your biases. But you can see things, and BE things, that you didn't even know you could see.
So, here's to adding lots of new toys to your adjacent possible toy box. Here's to getting out of the office and finding friends and books and spices and lands and ideas that may scare you - but will mostly enrich if you leave your fears of change and the unknown at the gate.
Final thought on perspective: The first thing that I ever ate - and my frame of reference for what I'd call excelence - was my mom's cooking. I will always be biased to it, no matter where I travel, what I eat, or who cooks it. She was an amazing cook. In spite of the fact that other people in other lands like other foods - and may think their mom's cooking is best - you'll never convince me otherwise. I'll taste it all... and then I'll return.
The lessons that are imprinted early and often become our first and most important vantage point. Neurologically, they create grooved pathways in our brains. They are our frame of reference, and our frame of reverance. We can learn to understand and appreciate other perspectives, but our personal knowledge, our personal perspective and underlying faith, will always lean toward that first imprinting. Even the new vantage points we may experience will be shaped, influenced, and directed in relation to that initial vantage point.
Here's to moms and dads, pastors and teachers, friends and strangers who teach us to value the point and place, the faces and faiths where they came from, but who aren't afraid to challenge us to move from those points to new and enriching perspectives.
