You Wake Up in a New World

December 10, 2025

Andrew Hedinger

You wake up one morning to find that the world around you has changed. Not the physical world, it is still made up of trees and grass, there are still sidewalks and buildings; but the human world… the world of interacting and talking and living.

The first thing you notice is the language. When you walk into your coffee shop the easy banter with the barista is gone; replaced by the struggle to understand a language you are just learning. When people talk too fast, you miss their meaning; when people use expressions you’ve never heard before, you miss their meaning. Sometimes even the words you thought you knew turn out to have additional meanings you never would have dreamed of, and you miss their meaning. Then it’s your turn, and you have to talk. What was the word for coffee, again? You can remember the standard greeting, but what do you do when they reply to that greeting with a joke or an idiom. The thought makes your stomach knot up and sweat bead on your forehead.  

As if the language wasn’t hard enough, there is the body language. You’ve bumped into someone you met at church yesterday and they are standing inches from your face bellowing, gesticulating, laughing, patting you on the shoulder all at the same time. Your first impulse is to step backwards, to restore your personal bubble; but the last time you talked with this friend you tried that and he only moved closer. Even as you think it might be worth trying again, his arm is on your back as he leads you to a table in the corner. You didn’t plan to stay at the coffee shop. In fact, you had hoped to get a quick cup of coffee and sneak back home before you bumped into anyone you knew. After the stress and mental labor of engaging with people at church yesterday, the thought of sitting quietly at your computer, writing emails in English, sounds heavenly. 

An hour later, you’ve finally extracted yourself from the conversation. You walk home hoping you didn’t inadvertently just promise your oldest son’s hand in marriage. Smiling and nodding can get you into a lot of trouble; but when you are barely keeping up with the torrent of words in a language you’ve just barely begun to understand, sometimes smiling and nodding is the best you can do.   

Peace at last. With a sigh you sink into your computer chair and open your email. The first message is from the mission’s pastor at your home church, “Hello, we’d love an update on the impact you are having on the mission field.” Impact?! You can barely order a cup of coffee without having a sinking feeling that you just agreed to something you will one day regret. What sort of impact are you supposed to have? How could you possibly make a difference in the lives of these people for the sake of the Gospel?  

This description, while fictional, is not dissimilar from what many cross-cultural ministers experience when they arrive on the field. Moving to a new language and culture is a disorienting and stressful experience. Cultural patterns permeate and organize almost everything about our interactions with other humans: the way we talk, the way we stand, the colors we use, how we schedule and organize our time, and how that schedule and organization can be interrupted. At an even deeper level, there are culturally defined patterns of thinking and feeling. 

When we are in our home culture we follow the patterns reflexively; we don’t have to think about how to interact with a barista or how close to stand when talking to a friend. We know how to make a persuasive argument because we have a good idea of what the other person is probably feeling or thinking. We know, because we learned these patterns from our parents and friends as children. But when we move into a new culture, with different cultural patterns, reflexive action becomes a liability; everything must be thought through, everything is different. This creates a problem for cross-cultural ministers. How do you have an impact for the Gospel when the patterns of life are so very different? 

The good news is that just like you learned the patterns of your home culture as a child, you can learn the patterns of a new culture as an adult. Of course, the process is different. As a child you didn’t know you were learning a culture; you only knew that when you got really excited and were standing inches from your friend, yelling, your mom pulled you back a half step and told you to use an inside voice. Over time you learned how close to stand, how loud to talk, how to tell someone politely that you didn’t have time to stop and talk because you needed to get to another appointment.  

As an adult you can learn a new language and culture, but doing so requires a specific set of attitudes, skills, and knowledge. While interacting in your home culture is reflexive, learning a new culture is a reflective process, one that requires observing, listening, asking questions, and then acting on what you’ve heard and seen.

At CultureBound our mission is to teach cross-cultural ministers the attitudes, skills, and knowledge they need to move from confusion and frustration to healthy relationships and Gospel impact. Over time, and with thoughtful use of the tools we teach, cross-cultural ministers move from dreading the conversation in the coffee shop to engaging their friends and neighbors at a heart level with the truth of the gospel.  

Over the next few blog posts, we will introduce some of the attitudes, skills, and knowledge we teach intercultural ministers as they prepare to move to the field.  

Andrew Hedinger grew up as a missionary kid in central Mexico. He now lives with his wife and children in Portland, Oregon where he serves as the Director of Admissions for Western Seminary.