Editor’s note: This book review was originally posted on the blog, A Life Overseas. It is reposted with permission from the author, Marilyn Gardner. Marilyn grew up in Pakistan and as an adult has lived in Pakistan, Egypt, the United States, and most recently Northern Iraq. She currently lives in Boston where she works with community health workers from immigrant and refugee communities. You can find her blogging at Communicating Across Boundaries. This review of the book Global Humility was written in 2018, just after she moved to Northern Iraq.
“Building bridges means moving beyond my enclave of cultural comfort, moving to a place of cultural humility and willingness to learn.”
Marilyn Gardner, Between Worlds, Essays on Culture and Belonging
Five weeks ago we moved from an apartment in the multicultural city of Cambridge, Massachusetts to an apartment in a city nestled beneath the kewa rash (black mountains) of Kurdistan in Northern, Iraq. We are learning to live and love in a city and country that we have known just through visiting. With this move, our daily life has changed dramatically.
We arrived in Rania like new born babies, eyes wide open to everything around us. Like babies, we don’t have language to describe our feelings and we too want to cry when we are hungry, or sleepy, or thirsty. But we are not babies. We are adults and we have many years behind us that effect how we engage and interact in our new surroundings.
A Book
It is within this context that I completed reading Global Humility: Attitudes For Mission by Andy McCullough. In this book, he asserts that the number one factor affecting missions in our world is lack of humility. This is a powerful and troubling assertion. It’s also an important one. Those of us who are Christians engaged in cross-cultural work, whether we be missionaries or not, have the important task of communicating across many boundaries. To do that well, humility is essential.
