Soon into our overseas assignment, it became clear that all of the academic, practical, and language study preparation had not completely equipped me for the task of understanding people in a cross-cultural setting.
Moreover, I discovered all of the university and seminary, plus the experiences in church planting and pastoring were somewhat defective in completely understanding what I saw, heard, and experienced in my new host country.
By this I do not mean to say that all of the academic, practical, or language study was useless. What I really needed to get a grasp on, if I wanted to understand anything at all, was the way the people looked at life, their mentality and world perspective.
Consequently, that original fascination of people and cultures that came from the stories of missionaries when I was a young boy was renewed. I then began a pilgrimage of learning as much as possible how to understand the people among whom I lived and had grown to love.
For seven years, I lived among Chinese Malaysians, observing and learning about their culture, beliefs, and language. During that period, I conducted hundreds of informal interviews with Chinese Malaysians in temples, marketplaces, homes, street-side coffee shops, shopping centers, and along road-sides. These informal interviews ranged from brief, about five minutes in length, to longer, about one hour in length.
When I look back, those seven years transformed how I viewed and functioned in a cross-cultural setting. In fact, it still guides, informs and even drives me to live more like Christ, an incarnational life that seeks to share a message of hope that is understood no matter the setting or culture.