In America

I was standing at the baggage carousel at Midway Airport in Chicago yesterday, waiting for my bag to come down from my flight from Denver, and as it approached I saw my suitcase as if I were seeing it for the first time. It’s an American Tourister, and so am I. I noticed that it is tattered and worn. So am I. The back is broken, the edges are rounded, and there are threads loose on every corner. I thought, “Dear Lord, save me. I have put every mile on that suitcase.” And as I thought about it, I realized I actually have three other suitcases I use as often as this one, which is another way to say I have put a lot of miles on. I think the difference, though, between me and my suitcase, is that while the worn corners and loose threads of my suitcase make me think it may be time to get another one, hopefully, the worn corners and loose threads of my life are making me a better person. I am praying it isn’t time to trade me in just yet.

I have been in America for almost a week and have been contemplating the question, “What is different here?”

I noticed a few differences almost immediately the first day after I arrived. My friend Brett picked me up at O’Hare last Sunday and we went out to Chili’s. That’s a difference, not only do we not have Chili’s in Dordrecht, we don’t have anything remotely like Chili’s. I got a big hamburger (and tried not to notice that what I ordered was called “The Old Timer” or some similarly insulting name) and also thought, “We sure don’t have anything that tastes like this in Dordrecht.” (People that saw me last week kept saying, “You’ve lost weight” and I kept answering, “You go to the grocery store without a clue what to buy and you’ll lose weight, too.”) But then the moment Brett and I had finished the last bite of our burgers, the waitress grabbed our plates and set a bill down. You wouldn’t think anything of this, but after a few European months I felt like saying, “What is your hurry? I am with my friend whom I haven’t seen for six months and we are having a wonderfully deep conversation. Just let us be, let us sit here and enjoy being human with each other for a while. There isn’t a line of people waiting to take our table. What is with you Chili’s people?” I have come to appreciate that when you get a table in a restaurant, that table is yours for as long as you want.

When I am in the Netherlands I am very aware that I am American and not European. But then I come back here and wonder how American I am. I wrote that I was experiencing culture shock and a mid-life crisis. I am not joking. Another way to say this is that I have been wondering a lot lately who I am and where I fit in this wide world of ours.

Nobody put any wine on any of the tables last week at the Young Life senior leadership team meetings I attended, and I noted that as a difference as well. In Europe, a group wouldn't eat without wine, and Americans are the poorer for that. We're so uptight that if you put wine out the group would suddenly turn into a bunch of drunks. But that doesn't happen. What happens instead is the group relaxes, slows down, and enjoys being with each other. I had a fellow staff member from Spain with me this week in Colorado, and after our first day of non-stop meetings he said, "You could learn something from us...the nap." He is exactly right. We meet way past the point of productivity.

I notice how fat people are here. And how opinionated about stupid things some of them are. There was a large old man on my plane sitting a couple of seats away from me talking loudly to someone else about topics like football, Las Vegas, Chicago, and the Swine Flu and peppering every third sentence with an F-bomb and I wanted to say, “We would all like you more if you kept your mouth shut and left us wondering what you thought instead of painfully revealing it” but instead I of course kept my mouth shut and thought, “I like Europeans.” When we got off the plane he had to have a wheelchair brought to him, and this is probably very unkind, but as near as I could see his disability was his weight. And once again I was thinking that life would be better if he had more oral self-control.

So I drove last night from Chicago to Grand Rapids and am writing this in my Michigan home. It feels really good to be here and to see that, as near as I can tell, Jesse is enjoying the fact that his parents abandoned him. As I was driving into Grand Rapids I passed a business that had a little neon sign next to the highway that simply said, “God Bless America” with a neon flag on it. And I thought, “Here is another difference.” You simply would never see a “God Bless Sweden” or “God Bless Belgium” sign. And it is NOT because those countries are filled with godless heathens. Let me try to explain, I probably won’t do a very good job, but let me try.

A European would never put up a God Bless Belgium sign because their self-image is much more humble than that. They know their country is small, and the main reason they created the European Union is so that together they might be able to have some influence in the world. (Which isn’t exactly working, because “European Union” is an oxymoron, kind of like “United Methodists.”) Every European country is small compared to the two largest powers in the world today, which are the US and China.

There is a bad theology afoot in the US that sees the US as the new Israel. In the Old Testament, God chose Israel as the nation he was going to work through. Somewhere under the surface on this side of the Atlantic, there is a notion that our nation is now God’s chosen vessel. I call this bad theology because the New Testament clearly shows that after the Israel experiment, God chose to work through a person named Jesus instead of a nation. But “God Bless America” feels a bit like this sort of “new Israel” thinking. Of course you are saying, “No, you are reading way too much into a simple sign, we simply want God to bless America” and I think a European would say, “Don’t you have enough already? You are the richest country in the world, you have these amazingly huge sprawling cities, you have unreal national parks, oceans, mountains, deserts, farmland, waterfalls, oil, gold, geo-thermal features…and that’s just Alaska and Hawaii.”

Does that make sense? To a European, God Bless America carries with it a certain arrogance that hints at feeling like God’s favorites. A European mentality would challenge us instead to put up a sign that asks God to bless our enemy – maybe a God Bless Afghanistan sign by the highway. Imagine the scandal that would cause.