New Perspectives

I used to dread summers in Haiti. No TV, no fast food, big banana spiders. The AC frequently cut out with the EDH electricity, making nights sweaty and sticky. The roads are mostly unpaved and bumpy. The air in Port-au-Prince smells like burning gasoline. 

I’m actually a homebody who enjoys familiarity and routine. Those summers in Haiti, though, taught me curiosity. They taught me grit. They taught me how to appreciate environments that are sometimes uncomfortable. Since summers in Haiti, my curiosity has grown to an insatiable extent; I crave leaving home and plopping myself in the middle of nowhere to taste, see and explore. What I’ve noticed about the value of travel, especially to places that are so different than where I’m from, is how much it has increased my empathy. No place is exactly like how the media describes. It humanizes those who society may be inclined to dismiss, and it sobers me to the difficult realities of the world. 

Mostly, travel has challenged my worldview to the extent that I’ve questioned it. Why do I believe what I believe? How do I know what I believe is true? It seems counterintuitive, but exposing oneself to different worldviews actually helped me reinforce my own. I encountered Jesus in a new way in the Middle East, where I learned from a local pastor that the supernatural activity in that region is so heavy that “you can drop a needle from the sky and hit a million demons on the way down”. I learned true strength when the refugee kids from Syria, who had been through so much trauma in their short little lives, played with abandon like they’d never known suffering before. I learned the value of naturopathic medicine in Morocco. I learned how to tend to the earth and steward its resources in Costa Rica. I learned true resilience in Haiti, which I now believe to be the most beautiful country in the world. Most of all, I learned different ways of being and borrowed an element from each culture to live a robust, healthy, worshipful life. 

Living in an echo chamber—in a place where everyone believes the same thing as you and looks like you—may feel comfortable, but it’s spiritually dangerous to remain in that bubble because it cuts off relating to others. It reinforces fearfulness and limitation towards what feels foreign. This world is abundant and expansive. Relating to those who are not like us is a Jesus-like quality; He who mingled with the Pharisees, lived in Rome, and traveled to the Pagan coastal regions, all while befriending corrupt tax collectors and prostitutes.