Singapore Roast

I was in Singapore a few weeks ago. My first morning there, we went to a Starbucks. It was walking distance from the hotel I was staying in. I was pretty amazed. The coffee tasted exactly the same as it does in the states. That’s really pretty remarkable, because in the hotel, and everywhere else--the coffee in Singapore does not taste like the coffee that I know and love. I’m not sure why it tastes different, and I’m not sure that it’s bad that it tastes different, but it does.

I felt so happy that I had the Starbucks, and I thought “well, that at least is right.” And suddenly I realized that I was playing the part of the ‘ugly American’, who thinks that the right way is the American way, that the only way is the American way.

I’m honestly surprised that my mind ran along that path, that I had that train of thought. You see, my family and I have lived in lots of places overseas. Tokyo, Bangkok, Jakarta, Las Vegas. Not visited, but lived. And when you live somewhere else for a reasonable length of time, you learn that different is normal. So I was surprised that I had the ‘ugly American’ thought.

It quickly passed, and I remembered what I already know. That my normal isn’t ‘THE normal.’ That in some sense, there is no ‘THE normal.’

My Mom owned her own business when I was a teenager. She was a partner in a fabric store. Something happened to her that bears on all this. She was ordering fabric from a supplier in Texas, and talking to someone there with a lovely soft drawl. They concluded their business, and the woman on the other end said to my Mom “I just love talkin’ to y’all out there in California; y’all have such a lovely accent!” My mom thought “wait a minute; you have the accent, not me!” Almost immediately, she realized that accent is a matter of perception.

So, when it comes to coffee, or breakfast foods, or accents, or even matters of spirituality, there isn’t normal.

People who have been in the church know that you get that feeling of ‘normal’ when you go to a particular church for a while. You get that feeling especially when you grow up in a particular church. But hopefully at some point you go out, and you meet other people of the faith, and you attend say a black church, or a high church, or a low church, or a rock church, or a church of artists, or a church of therapists, or a church of egg-headed theologians, or a church of Japanese speakers, and you begin to think how few people in the world are normal. From there you progress through the “I’m not the normal one,everyone else is” and on to “everyone is normal”, and finally to you might arrive at “no one is normal.”

The problem with the concept of normal connected to church is the problem of God. You see, God, in the Christian mind, is beyond what we see and understand. To us, He is not completely knowable. And, if we are to have a relationship with Him, which is honestly the whole point of the Christian Faith, then it stands to reason that this relationship will be pretty unstable. We’ll be constantly bumping into this infinite God who is ultimately unknowable, and that will be an unsettling and not a ‘normal’ relationship. One reason we do church is so we can get together with other people and encounter this unknowable God in whatever limited ways we can, and get to know him a little better. So probably church done right is always a little unsettling, and there certainly isn’t anything normal about it.

The other reasons we do church is because we can get to know this unknowable God better by getting to know other believers. It’s weird, but we are called His Body. We believers are his physical presence. When you meet other believers and get to know them, this is when you really begin to understand that there isn’t anything normal about this Body.

But we are drawn to the normal. We yearn for it. We love it. We want the comfortable. We want the coffee we know, served in the cup we know, by someone with an accent we know, whose prayer ends “in Jesus Name, Amen,” just like normal prayers end.

In my better moments, I’m not satisfied with all that. In my better moments, I want to know God more, and to know more of this unknowable God, I’m going to have to be willing to set aside the normal, the comfortable, the known, and find in other believers, the uncomfortable, the weird, the accented; and learn to love that. By this I hope that I will gather in more that was previously unknown by me of this ultimately unknowable God.

Of course, that sounds good, I want to be courageous, I want to stretch myself. I’m completely willing to do the hard work, with one caveat. There must be a Starbucks in walking distance.