Cross culture

Someone working in another country expressed her tension over being in one country and longing for 'home' and reflecting that if she was home she would long to be in Asian country she had moved to.
It is indeed a dilemma for people who work across cultures because they are in between the cultures and are neither one nor the other. Some expatriates try and create a world like the one they have left and emphasize aspects of the culture they have left. I have met British people in other countries who seemed more British than people in Britain. However, the home culture is never as simple as such folk imagine and by failing to engage with the people they are among they miss an opportunity for growth in understanding other people and learning new things from their ways. Furthermore, their lack of interaction means that they do not add their bit to the social and cultural mix. I found that being in another culture does throw into relief my own background and its strengths and weaknesses. Cultural differences become apparent and need to be assessed and bad things discerned but many features such as music, art, language are not to be despised but rather to be valued and learned from.
It is curious how, like plants, some aspects of culture transplant easily and others do not. Association football [soccer] has caught on in Africa, cricket in the Indian sub-continent and curries in Britain. On the other hand soccer and cricket have not flourished in the same way in the USA and American football has had little appeal in Europe.
There is 'culture shock' when we go to live in a new culture though we do expect things to be different. We spent 5+ years in Central Africa, a life-affecting experience, but when we came home we were surprised by the 'reverse culture shock' which is a two-edged sword because:
[1]. Home had changed since we left, it had moved on for better or worse, and on coming home we faced these changes. We may or may not have liked them but adjusting took longer than we expected.
[2]. We were changed by living somewhere else and by being immersed in another world with different languages, customs and values which we missed on coming home. We were not as we were when we left and adjusting to home again took longer than we thought it would.

Christians belong to this world and another world so are always between the cultures with the two worlds interacting. As the Citonga translation of a verse in Philippians has it 'Munzi wesu uli kujulu' ['our village is in heaven'] - we live in this world as people who belong to heaven and that can create tensions and frustration as well as filling us with love, joy and peace as our life is shared with the heavenly man, our risen and ascended Saviour and friend, Jesus Christ.