Living in a different culture is an interesting thing. As I stretch and adjust to my surroundings, I am forced to examine the way I do things and ask if what I do is because of my personality or inherited from my culture, something that glorifies God or just something I do without much thought. Such introspection engenders growth, but not without a fair share of discomfort.
For instance, truth-telling where I live is viewed quite differently from where I come from. People swear to God all the time, even responding to something amazing you say by saying, “swear to God?” The funny thing is, swearing to God has no bearing on whether they’re actually telling the truth or not. The person’s reputation is more important than whether or not he/she is giving you a true version of events, so a lot of the time, it’s anybody’s guess when anybody actually means anything. By contrast, I’m used to more or less telling it like it is, with no need to swear to show you mean what you say.
Anyways, I say all that to say that living in this culture is affecting me. There’s this nifty trick where you can say “inshallah”, God willing, and it can mean anything from yes to no to maybe so. It’s basically a get-out-of-jail-free card if you don’t want to hang out with someone and don’t want to tell them that. The upshot of all of this is that I’m afraid I’ve become quite a bit of a flaky person. The conception of timeliness is different here, too, so schedules are less fixed, so it’s ridiculously easy to just make excuses and get out of things. I used to feel like I was pretty dependable to show up and on time, and now I’m not sure how true that is or will be when I go home.
It is a constant battle to determine what is important to me or essential to my personality, and then either holding on to that in the face of the culture or giving it up to God to change it.