darn wrinkles..

There were no irons in the whole house. How could this be? I looked everywhere but there were none to be found. It was quite a predicament. How could I show up at the church with a wrinkled shirt? However, there was nothing else to be done, so I went ahead and left the house with wrinkles in my shirt, though I chose to cover them as much as possible by wearing a suit jacket over them.

I got in the car and encountered another problem. I tried to shift gears, but the gearshift was on the wrong side. It was then that I remembered something very important. I was in America. That meant that the gear shift was on the right of the steering wheel rather than on the left. It was a good thing to remember before I got out on the road as this realization would obviously also affect my decision as to which side of the road I was to drive on.

I was in Colville, Washington for the first of two weeks of preaching engagements in the state of Washington in the United States. When I got to the church, I also noticed that a lot of people had wrinkles in their shirts, and as the week progressed I stopped worrying about ironing.

It's interesting to me how quickly we can be affected by a change of environment or by the culture in which we live. This obsession with perfectly pressed shirts was something I would have laughed at before I came to Britain, but here they iron everything: t-shirts, trousers, and sometimes even socks! As I returned briefly to the land where I grew up, I suffered culture shock in the strangest of ways. Even ordering meals at restaurants seemed suddenly odd. In America, you can't just order a full breakfast. You have to tell them how you want your egg cooked, what kind of bread you want (and sometimes they give you 1,223.4 choices to choose from!), and you have to choose from a million options regarding every detail of your breakfast. It's amazing! I don't mind it of course, but every time I reenter the States the phenomenon of ordering breakfast does throw me and, frankly, confuse me!

I suppose one life lesson that I got from all of this during my recent two weeks in America is that we are all profoundly affected by the culture in which we live. We tend to start thinking and acting more and more like the people we spend our time with. I guess that's one reason why, no matter what country we live in, we should choose our friends carefully!

My time in America was great though. I preached for 11 days in a row in churches north of Spokane, Washington and a number of people came to Christ. I also talked with a number of people who told me that they were greatly helped and encouraged in life-changing ways during this time.

I also got to go up to Canada for part of a day. I had a few hours off, and I was already close to the border, so I took my work to a coffee shop in a little town called Grand Forks, British Columbia. It amazed me again how quickly the culture changed just across the border. In many ways, it was like I was in a different world again. The barista in the coffee shop asked me where I was staying, and I told him I was staying down in Colville, Washington. He looked at me sympathetically and made a comment about Americans. Somehow he never caught on that I was actually an American myself! The funny thing is, he thought I was Irish! I guess I've been to and lived in so many places that I am just confusing now. I don't mind though. At least not as long as there's an ironing board nearby.