I am beginning to realize, slowly by slowly, that God is so much larger than my identity, that He is larger than my countries and all of the space in between. He is in the quiet, lonely dusk, filled with birdsong. God is not confined to one language. He is not confined to a certain culture. He has inserted the knowledge of himself into every culture in order to redeem people from each culture.
To misquote Victor Hugo: "As he spoke all tongues, he entered into all hearts"
He celebrates each of our cultures infinitely more than we do, because he made them. He hurts because of the pain in each of our cultures infinitely more than we ever could, because he was there when pain entered the world. As he has created all cultures, he remembers the children who cross all cultures.
He loves our cultures and can empathize with our hurt, rejoice with our joys, speaks all of our languages, even when we are so confused that we speak all of them at once. We believe that we are alone sojourning this earth. No one will understand every part of us. We will always be foreigners because in our host culture we feel at home, but don't look like everyone else, and in our parents' culture(s) we generally look like we belong, but do not feel anywhere close to belonging, and this can be isolating. But does the one who has intricately created each culture not understand the cultures we have adopted? Does he not intimately know our every eccentricity, our every unexpressed pain, frustration, joy, confusion, bitterness, exhuberation?
He created all cultures. He knows our culture. The culture that we have made of the many in which we have lived and which now has become part of us. He understands and empathizes with us. And he loves us so much that he made Jesus a TCK. He was born in Bethlehem, lived in Egypt until Herod died, then moved to Nazareth. According to the Gospels, he was a nomad who had "no place to lay his head". So often I have failed to realize that as nomad kids ourselves, we are in perfect company with many great people from the Bible. Isaac was born to parents from Ur, but grew up in Canaan. Moses' parents were Hebrew, but he grew up with Egyptians until he ran away to Midian. Joshua's parents were Hebrews who had grown up in Egypt, but he grew up in the Sinai desert. Daniel was taken from his home in Israel and grew up in Babylon. Ruth was a Moabite who moved to Israel and married an Israelite. Esther was a Jew who grew up in Babylon. Timothy's father was Greek, and his mother Jewish. Paul was a Jew from Tarsus, and a citizen of Rome, which many people did not understand. But the Bible does not mention the fact that these people were third culture kids (possibly because David Polluck was not around during the canonization process of the Bible) but because the fact that they followed God was so much more important to convey than the fact that they were TCKs or CCKs.
And this is how it ought to be for us. Our identity should be as adopted and chosen sons and daughters of the Creator of the Universe, not in the fact that we lived in five different countries before we entered college, or speak four languages, or had so many great or painful experiences that no one in any of our cultures will ever understand us. As Paul (this is the same Paul who was a TCK) says in 1 Corinthians "If I speak in the tongues of men (Chinese, French, Russian etc.) and of angels (definitely Arabic, but I'm biased), but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging symbol." If we have intimate knowledge of every airport, of the best and worst plane food, of the most authentic cuisine in our countries; if we live lives that surpass what people see in National Geographic magazines, but do not have God, we are nothing. Understand that Paul (the TCK) considered everything as loss in comparison with knowing Christ.
This is difficult. Because I value my experiences as a TCK. I value languages. I value learning about different cultures and getting to know people from other cultures. I value ethnic food. Sometimes I boast in my worldliness. But Paul, still a TCK, considered everything as loss compared to knowing Christ. So, if Paul is right, everything I value as a TCK, all of my TCK experiences, could never come close to value in knowing Christ, in fact they are so much less that they are considered losses.
I will be honest and say that often I lose sight of that. When I take on TCK as an identity, it often becomes crippling. My identity being a TCK is probably in large part a reason for why I do not have many American friends. Most of my friends in America are TCKs. When I arrived in America three years ago, I expected to have no friends from past experiences, and I used the fact that I was a TCK as an excuse to not get to know some people I could have. As my friend and fellow TCK Lizzy Wiley puts it "TCK is an experience, not an identity."
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