What Does It Mean to Live in the Borderlands?

It is far easier living deep inside one’s own culture than it is living on the edge between cultures. I am one of those people who constantly find themselves in those in-between places, what we can describe as borderlands.

Borderlands are at once challenging and exhilarating. They are anything but relaxing. But they are places where real growth and development happen, and where great need is waiting to be met. Borderlands are places of calling – and places for finding God.

I have a friend, a botanist who studied mosses around a mountain up in the Himalayas for a couple of years. This friend, we’ll call him “Chen,” later spent much of his career researching the borderlands between China and the neighboring Golden Triangle to the south. This mountainous region in northeastern Myanmar, northwestern Thailand, and northern Laos, is famous as one of the largest opium-producing areas of the world.

But Chen, a native of China, was not interested in the opium market as much as he was in studying the impact these porous political borders have on human, animal, and plant life and the interaction of species. What does the border stop? What does it not stop? How do trade and migration, both human and otherwise, play out across artificial political lines? How does the diversity of converging cultures and human governments impact each other? Chen found these borderlands, abounding in ecological and cultural diversity, full of life.

I knew a law enforcement chief in the interior of China, far from any borderlands. He told me how a foreigner, a student from South Korea, had gone missing, and how he had had to track him down. The officer went as far as those very same borderlands of Chen’s research before the student’s trail grew cold. He told me the trail ended in an area that even the national army didn’t like entering. What with its steep mountains, fast rivers, minority cultures, and drug-running gangs, it was not a pleasure post. Such borderlands have a life – and a law – of their own.

Our world is full of borderlands, and not just of the type found along the confluence of two or more nations. There are borderlands of faith, borderlands between cultures, borderlands in political agendas, borderlands between the haves and the have nots, and certainly borderlands where people with contrasting values share uncomfortable space. These are the places where human contrasts meet in all their glory.

Far from the purist cultures which autocrats and isolationists prefer, borderlands are places where God beckons us to go. It is where we meet Jesus, the personification of heaven meeting earth. Our borderlands may be more like hell meeting earth, but even more the reason to follow Jesus who is said to have descended into hell to preach to those who were there.

When I lived in East Asia, I worked hard to become like those around me, but I could never change my face – “big noses” are what some locals call those of us in the West and Middle East. It even affected how people heard or didn’t hear what I was working to say in their own language. Responding to me, one man told me, “I don’t understand your face.”

And yet, there were those who warmed my heart when they would say to their colleagues of me, “He’s one of us.”

Borderlands. Not my own culture, but learning to embrace another, to immerse myself in other people’s worlds. Like a fish out of water, I’ve hung out with Communist Party officials, Muslim Imams, and Buddhist neighbors. As a Pentecostal, I’ve worked with Unitarians, Methodists, even complementarian Fundamentalists. I’ve learned to engage – with varying degrees of success – Christian nationalists and Anti-Christian leftists.

To be honest, I prefer the comfort of my own home. But even there, I find myself drawn to engage with those with whom I share sharp disagreements. Otherwise, why would I be writing this blog or engaging on Facebook, that warm and fuzzy world of social media kumbaya? I am called to follow Jesus and, if Jesus insists on going into the borderlands, there too must go I.

I invite you on a journey with me, a spiritual journey, to pass through the borderlands of our times, to understand how to survive, how to thrive, how to engage, and how to dwell in places – geographical or metaphorical – where cultures and values clash. We’ll talk belief and politics, justice and compassion, faith and doubt, conflicting values, and being witnesses in the public square. We’ll explore ideas, stories of individuals, books, movies, and other resources. And we’ll see where it all takes us.

We live in dangerous times. But when have times not been dangerous? Even so, certain times do have a heightened sense of trouble and perhaps this is one of those.

During the Covid epidemic, an old quote from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings became a steadying guide for me. I hung it on my office wall the day I left for a year of working remotely from home:

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.

“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

The time we live in is ours and what will we do with it? That is the question we want to explore in this twice-weekly blog, “On a journey in the borderlands.” Technology willing, I’ll be publishing a post every Tuesday and Saturday.

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