I recently went through six weeks of training in the mountains of North Carolina. In this experience, God met me in so many meaningful ways. The teaching was incredible, although kind of overwhelming at times. Something that surprised me in a great way was how close the group of us became in that short time. It was incredible to be in an environment where none of us had to explain ourselves. All of us students were at pretty similar points in this journey, and all of our instructors had been in this place previously, so there was a deeper level of understanding among us than I’ve experienced outside of that environment.
In training, our time was split into two sections, four weeks about cross-cultural life and ministry, and two weeks about language learning. One of the first topics we covered was a concept called ethnocentrism. This is defined as, “A tendency to view other ethnic or cultural groups from the perspective of one's own.” Before we enter a new culture, we have to be aware of how our own culture changes how we see the world. We aren’t called to be ambassadors of the American culture, but rather to be ambassadors of a Kingdom culture. A lot of cultural differences in the world aren’t necessarily right or wrong, they’re just different. We have to approach individuals and the culture as a whole with humility, and a posture of listening, seeking to understand the differences we see and experience. When we go into another culture, we can’t expect people to meet us halfway or just agree to disagree. We have to be the ones to put extra effort into understanding their perspective.
The second language acquisition part of training was something I was both looking forward to and very curious about. With my background in ESL (teaching English as a second language), many of my college classes had to do with the language learning process, and I was wondered what kind of overlap this would have with my previous training. It was such a great experience to learn more about myself as a learner and figure out a plan for how to learn language once I’m overseas. One of the things that I knew about myself is that I have high expectations for myself, and I don’t like to make a lot of mistakes. A phrase that our instructors used often was, “You’re going to make a million mistakes… get started!” As we put our learning into practice, I found that it was a lot easier to make mistakes and to laugh at myself than I thought. And while it’s good to have high expectations to an extent, my instructors helped make sure my goals were also attainable.
Something that I will take with me to the field is a small set of notecards that we were all given at the start of training. Throughout our lessons, we were encouraged to write down some of our takeaways, thoughts, or key points that stuck out to us. These are just a few simple reminders of what I took away from my time in training…
- As our awareness of God’s holiness and our sinfulness grows, so must our understanding of the gospel
- Being busy for God is very different than spending time with God
- What God wants to do in us is as important as what He wants to do through us
- Working harder and praying less is ministry in the flesh
- We can teach what we know, but we reproduce who we are
Learning all this in training (and more!) was great, but I know that even more learning will take place as I reflect on the lessons learned in training and apply them to my life overseas. That said, I’m sure I will have more reflections related to my time in training in the future!