The submitted poem was written while serving in Italy and reflects both my experience as an “immigrant,” a “foreign pastor,” and the experiences I often saw and heard from the members of my congregations (two of which were inter-cultural, multi-ethnic, and multi-lingual).
I decided to share this poem because I’ve found that few people understand how complicated it is to live, work, and worship in a culture and language that is vastly different from the one they grew up in. I hoped that offering up some of my own experience, it might help others who hearken from a background like my own to “hear” and “see” a little bit of the struggle involved.