Half a Year in Taiwan - Some Serious Thoughts

As of 4 days ago, I marked 6 months of long-term service here. It's been an interesting time, with some surprising struggles, and unexpected encouragements.

Since in about a week I will be busy and travelling for summer camps until sometime in the latter half of July, this week seems like a good chance to reflect on lessons I've learned and am learning.

 

Reflections on these six months...

 

1. Expectations might be your enemy, but you can't ever quite succeed in not having them.

I tried not too have too many expectations coming back to Taiwan, but the very experience that made it a more feasible task to swap continents, lifestyles, and environments also inevitably meant that I would have some expectations based on that experience. Much of the experience that gave rise to those expectations was valuable, crucial even, to working effectively here this time, but the hardest thing coming back has been the frustration of some of those expectations.

I imagine most of you know what culture shock is; well reverse culture shock is the (often unexpected, and sometimes more difficult) shock one experiences when returning to one's home culture and realizing that your perspective has been changed as a result of your experiences in a new culture, and that you now view your home culture in a slightly different way. Sometimes your eyes are opened to negative things you never noticed before, sometimes your priorities have simply be rearranged, but either way it can be difficult to experience and nearly impossible for anyone who hasn't experienced it themselves to sympathize with you.

The blessing of my prior experience of living in Taiwan for a year affected my coming here this time in nearly every possible way, basically letting me hit the ground running. I was actively doing ministry within a few days of arriving while my brain was doing overtime trying to get used to being in constant Chinese mode. At the same time I was caught unprepared for the painful realization that Taiwan, and more specifically my acquaintances in Taiwan, had not been static and unchanging in the 5+ years in between last time I lived here and now. Kids who were in middle school my first few trips to Taiwan, and only early highschool when I lived here that year, are now getting into their early 20's. Being still in my 20's until next year, that means we're all in our 20's together, which is fun and meaningful in some ways and rather odd at the same time!

At the same time, old friends have moved on with their lives, with those fundamental changes that creep in between your mid 20's and your late 20's. I discovered some friendships have survived, many haven't, and the warmth with which I was welcomed back to Taiwan before my actual arrival turned out to be more or less unrelated to the eagerness of the welcomers to actually meet with me once I was here. Some former acquaintances are now friends, some friends are now more like old acquaintances, and I find myself not starting with anything like the social circle I thought I had coming in.

You could call it reverse-reverse culture shock, perhaps; learning to dodge the jab of culture shock only to be hit with a left hook when moving back into reach of the same culture again. But I think a more accurate term would be simply time shock; regardless of culture, it hits all of us sooner or later.

2. Yes I Still Love Taiwan!

The process of getting over here nearly gave me ulcers again. ("Let go and let God" sounds lovely and serene, but my experience is more like "Hold on tight and ask God to keep your fingers from getting broken if this thing comes to a quick stop") Having finally made it, though, it is such a tremendous blessing to have been given a love for the place to which you are called. And love is the right term, because the like gets stretched at times, but in the end I wouldn't want to be anywhere else.

My work here is varied; I am not just here to "do ministry," though there's plenty of that, I am here to be a living representative of Christ. That calling leads to everything from teaching songs to 2nd graders and English to 80+ year old seniors using DIY bingo cards, to having late night Skype meetings with American short-term mission teams because of the time difference, to discussing concepts of Christianity and Taiwanese culture in mandarin with my young professional friends in elaborately-ambianced cafes, to turning the tables on pairs of Mormon missionaries and witnessing to them instead.

I'm not sure where Taiwan lies on the scale of comfort in terms of mission fields. It's really a false question because how comfortable you are depends on a lot of factors, and the overall environment and modernity of your surroundings is merely one of those. One could get along quite happily with a great ministry team planting churches in jungles, slums, or even a city dump, or push through day after discouraging day with no visible progress in your lonely coffee shop gospel outreach in a posh, comfortable neighborhood of a global city.
For my part, I tend to feel lucky that I get to live here. Sometimes when a short term team visits, though, I'm reminded that not everyone shares my enthusiasm for the details of life here. Living in Taiwan comes with all the benefits and drawbacks of living in/right next to the tropics:

There's intense humidity (hanging one's clothes out to dry may result in their mildewing instead), the insect life is diversely sized and numerous (from air-thickening mosquitoes to flying cockroaches to spiders that are like skinny tarantulas), nothing lasts more than a couple of hours without being refrigerated, garbage disposal becomes a serious endeavor that requires planning and multiple types of garbage bags, one is typically soaked in either rain or sweat within 90 seconds of going out the front door, I could go on. Most expats actually flee Taiwan after the school year ends to spend the relentlessly muggy summer elsewhere.

On the other hand one can drink inexpensive fresh papaya milk between waving palm trees under a glowing blue sky and feel that all that is not so bad. And since it's Taiwan, you might just as easily be doing that in front of a 3-story, Times Square-style LED billboard that's advertising cough syrup with Chinese medicinal herbs, or next to a quaint country train station built in the old Japanese colonial style with summer breezes playing through the flooded rice fields. There could be a garbage truck playing Fur Elise, or a guy beatboxing Mario bros. across from the barbecued squid stand.

Really, you never know what you'll see...

A Rubber Ducky bigger than a Starbucks floating in the harbor? Yeah, you might see that.

3. Things Never Stop Changing Anywhere in the World.

Taiwan in 2014 is a little more tired, a little less affluent. Taiwan's overall cultural worldview is even more heavily centered around almighty Success than America's is, so the lack of it (worse, due to global economic conditions and Taiwan's rather unique situation, the creeping realization of the inevitable future lack of it) affects people and society in general here even more deeply.

So the "cheerfulness" factor in general is noticeably down for someone who's only been back on a few short trips between 2008 and the end of last year. The glory days were just ending then, and there was happy inertia. Not so much now.
Of course all this is compared to the 'Taiwanese miracle' days of being one of the 4 Asian Tiger economies. So having come down several notches from that doesn't qualify as "hard times" yet here, but it's harder than many students now have ever known. Up until the middle of that decade people had been throwing out old stuff and buying new, now they're holding onto what was new in 2008 and it's not so shiny anymore. Graduating students don't find jobs waiting for them. It's a similar situation to what America faces now, really, except America has far more power, resources, and potential options.Taiwan is in a difficult political situation, and their friends are few and not willing to challenge China. In the past, the US was a guarantee that China would not unilaterally move to change the situation, but nowadays that's looking less and less like a surety.

Of course, while obviously no one enjoys a decline in prosperity, we have to ask the most important question: What does this mean for the gospel in Taiwan?
Honestly, it will probably result in people being more open to listen. People accuse Christianity of being a crutch for the weak, but it's far more the case that success is a crutch for the mortal; a means to pretend to control his own fate. Once the idols one worshipped in exchange for hope of worldly success seem ineffective, people will be more willing to listen to those who claim there is a God whose hope is not of this world. (They'll also be less willing to tolerate missionaries who don't seem to be contributing to Taiwan's economy, so we'll see how that situation progresses.)

4. I Need More of God

I am increasingly aware that my own relationship to God is more relaxed than fervent. The focus in American Evangelicalism on sound Biblical doctrine is very important, but it should serve as the rails on which our train runs, not the station we're headed to. God seeks to know us, and our path in life is to walk with Him, not only have very scripturally sound ideas about Him.

My time in seminary was glorious and blessed, but my lifestyle over those 3+ years was totally exhausting physically, mentally, and spiritually. My faith was strengthened and not weakened, praise God, by the fearless and intimate look at His word "behind the scenes" that my seminary offered. It was not confusion and dismay at some of the Sunday School Answers being challenged so much as relief that for some topics there were more complicated and grown-up answers that were much more satisfactory while not challenging scriptural authority whatsoever. (Sometimes the original text even leaves room for more than one interpretation! What a relief to find that we can disagree with each other on non-doctrine level questions and still all be equally convinced of the truth of Scripture.)

But by the time it was over, I needed rest and recovery. The time in Alabama was mostly an unstable "between time," with several months of "oh, you're still here?" It was valuable time spent with family and old friends, which I am grateful for, but also stressful in that I was neither here nor there.

After finally arriving in Taiwan and after the initial few months of transition, my life began to assume some kind of normal routine. I began to realize the lack of normal routine or stable life situation had seriously affected my daily walk. I'd been praying and working through so many big, one-time issues both as I left the US and upon arriving here that I'd gotten entirely out of the habit of setting aside daily time with God.

In America that's wrong, it's spiritual laziness, and being actively involved in church isn't sufficient to make up for it.
But Taiwan is not America. This is not Christendom, and never was; idolatry has never been seriously challenged until these few decades, and the real breakthrough hasn't happened yet. Here, under spiritual warfare and without a consistent church home, trying to plant a church in a spiritually resistant community where no steeples rise but the chimneys of many daoist sacrificial furnaces do, where the air is often thick with the smoke of burnt paper money and joss incense, what was detrimental to my spiritual health in the US is here an imminent danger.

(By way of analogy, imagine back when they had the smoking sections and non-smoking sections in restaurants. Sure, you could still smell dangerous second-hand smoke sometimes drifting over from the smoking section, but spiritually speaking this is like sitting at the table full of people smoking)

So if I don't hold onto time in God's presence on a personal level, actively seeking after Him, I will be dragged away from Him. Not from salvation, the enemy can't touch that. But your spiritual health can be chipped away bit by bit, and here I see how that can happen. Missionaries need your prayer for more than just the success of their ministry, when they go into the enemy's territory with the gospel they get the enemy's poisonous attention.

Sacrificial pig on display during Ghost Month, a plea to ancestral spirits to not harass the living

 

5. Taiwan Needs Prayer, More Than Ever Before

Even without this special kind of spiritual pressure, being on the mission field our reliance on God is made more obvious. I submit that this should not only be the case on the mission field, but it can be more difficult to leave our comfort zone when it's the default and you have to work to get out of it, whereas on the mission field being out of your comfort zone is the default and you have to work to fine one, if it's even possible.

In any case, we pray a lot! We know that any success in this kind of spiritual endeavor (and in the face of this warfare) will come through God's work, not our plans. We are all ambassadors for Christ here, and that role is made glaringly obvious in a land where most people's reaction to Christ is neither acceptance nor denial, but a shrug. He's great for you westerners, but what has He go to do with Taiwanese?

Missionaries have been in Taiwan for a long time, but the gospel has only reached certain sections of the population. The church that does exist cannot be described as consistently healthy either. I've noticed that some people think that while the church in America is sometimes sadly described as a mile wide and an inch deep, in countries with only a small church presence it must be the opposite; small gatherings of passionate and fearless believers. Taiwan is more or less neither, to be honest. In terms of Protestant Christians, there are a few dozen very large churches on the island, several thousand in total (most having fewer than 50 people on an island of 23 million people), and most of them are similar to American churches. People come on Sunday, maybe participate in a weekday night service or maybe not, and in small churches the "80-20 rule" (80% of the work done by 20% of the church) might even be more like 90-10. Or frighteningly often, only the pastor, because he's the "professional Christian," and it's his job to do the spiritual stuff, right?

I have noticed even more strongly this time living here that the prosperity gospel is also rampant in Taiwan. Joel Osteen is in literally almost every church bookstore. When you worship idols, it's a very natural transition. Idols (and the gods they represent) don't love you, but they can help you get stuff you want if you worship them. How much better to change your allegiance from a bunch of small gods to one big God who loves you -and- will help you get the stuff you want if you worship Him?

Please continue to pray for Taiwan.

6. Seeking My Place in Taiwan

"Doing" ministry in Taiwan is not always easy but it at least consists of relatively clearly defined tasks with goals you can write down. "Being" in Taiwan is what has presented me with the most difficulties so far, and it's something I want to work on. Who am I, here?

As a westerner in Taiwan, I'm not under any illusions that I'll ever be Taiwanese in the strict sense. If I spoke absolutely fluent and brilliant Mandarin, Taiwanese, and Hakka too, was a Taiwanese citizen, wrote famous historical novels about Taiwan in Chinese, had a seat in the Taiwanese legislature, whatever.. to a random person on the street I would be a white tourist. That's just how it is.

In a way, though, that takes some pressure off. If I was in Germany, say, for lifelong ministry, I might be tempted to set the goal to basically become German. This would be impossible in one sense (I didn't and now can never grow up Germany), but it would seem much more attemptable, as being ethnically Northern European, after some years, in dress, posture, and maybe even language, it's conceivable that I could appear to be and come across as a native German. That's an extremely difficult thing to do, and arguably you lose out on some benefits that you bring to the table as a foreigner in terms of ministry. It also leads to interesting identity issues.

In Taiwan, since this is impossible, I don't have the temptation to try. I am not content, however, to remain solely on the sidelines. My goal is to be fluent in at least Mandarin, and find a place in Taiwan's society, an accepted role among my friends and acquaintances and coworkers, so I can have an identity here other than "guest who doesn't leave." Some have suggested that's impossible. Maybe so. At this stage I think it's too early to say, so I will forge ahead and see what happens. It's true that it would have been more of a feasible option had I gotten here 9 years ago and spent all my 20's here, making friends long before those friends started families. So I know I'm arriving late in the game, but it's also a game without clearly defined rules, so maybe I can write a few myself. Only time and God's providence will tell.

So please keep praying for me too; it's been a long road but my journey is only beginning...