Upholding Righteousness

Living overseas in any type of culture is difficult.   It’s difficult because it feels like it contaminates your culture.  It challenges your way of doing things. 

What is culture?

Culture is how a people group feel it is normal to act.

Our culture seeps out of us in our language, table manners, parenting, marriages, friendships, driving, housing, bureaucracy, spending… I could go on.  There are quite a few obvious cultural differences but there are 1,000 more unobvious differences as well and to be honest the ones that are unobvious are the hardest to wrestle with.  Every single country, continent and people group have their own culture.  When we start mixing this it can become very frustrating and also very scary.

A few days ago I found myself frustrated by my kids and their new “attitudes” since moving here to Portugal.  The language here is harsh and loud and it seems sometimes like its seeping into them.  For example, a simple question to pass the salt sounds like your demanding and demeaning. Where the 
American in me wants to say “sorry but if you don’t mind 

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