Michelle's Musings - A Different Perspective

Growing up as the child of immigrants, I found I often had a different perspective on events. It comes with the territory – especially since I often visited my family overseas as I was growing up. It left me with a sense that there were other possibilities.

It explains why I was so frustrated by mass transit in Pittsburgh while I was growing up. In the Netherlands, I could hop on busses and trains to visit every single grandparent, aunt and uncle across the entire country – why couldn’t I hop on a bus to get to the mall here? Likewise, almost every town and city there had designated sidewalks – often even bicycle paths. Don’t get me started on the lack of sidewalks in American suburbs…

The same was true to some extent when I was there. From an early age, I found myself filling in the spaces of the impressions my relatives got about Americans from the media. I spent time in a Dutch high school, and talked about the amount of individualization the high school system afforded – the ability to take honors French, but middle track math, for example. Time and time again, I found myself explaining to everyone that our family had two cars, because most families need two cars, at least in suburban Pittsburgh. People had a hard time understanding that.

And so, when I went back to visit my relatives this summer, I was not surprised to find myself explaining the existence of other possibilities. But what had changed, was my perspective.

In conversation after conversation, with relatives and friends, I found myself saying, “Of course, the Church has a different perspective.”

Time and time again, as I talked about current events, I found myself looking at things from a Christian perspective. We talked about care for elderly parents; the increasing individualization of society and lack of concern for the common good; the changes in the Dutch education system; and, of course, politics. My cousins are all my age or older – many facing the same sandwich that we face here, caring for both children and aging parents. They are mid-career, mostly: teachers, nurses, artists, social workers, lawyers, and others. Our conversations were much the same as they have been on other trips, and yet, different. As we talked, I noticed I was juggling not one perspective (American or Dutch) or two, but three. The Christian perspective stood in contrast to a lot of what I saw in both cultures.

Take, for example, social work. One of my cousins works as a case worker, his wife is the social worker at a school (they met in grad school). He talked about his work, about his ability to get people out of troubled situations, and find a way forward. In some ways, his work is a little bit easier than it is for social workers here – there are more placements available in rehab facilities, and people are a little less reluctant to seek help than they are here. He asked about mental health provisions under Obamacare. But, he acknowledged, even with better resources, he felt frustrated. Getting people out of bad situations didn’t always give them a direction, or a sense of worth.

For Christians, that sense of worth can come from a belief that they were created by God, who loved them. That’s a perspective that neither the Dutch nor the Americans can offer.

There were lots of different examples of this, that popped up in conversations. Always, with respect and humility.

And I think, in doing that, I offered a different perspective, too. In Europe, and increasingly in the U.S., too, many people think that religious perspectives are automatically judgmental ones. Or that they only pertain to one segment of life – what happens on Sunday, or on Saturday for those who are Jewish. Muslims, with their practice of prayer five times a day, confuse people, because they are a reminder that for the faithful, religion permeates our lives.

Much of what I say and do is rooted – in ways I don’t always even realize – in my faith. My love of nature, my efforts experience other places and cultures, my pain at violence and injustice I see in the news – these all come from my belief that God made the world, and calls us to love and nurture those in it. It’s a different perspective. But it is the one that grounds us.