Living Your Difference As Gift

As someone living and working in another country and culture, I have become quite familiar with the experience of “difference”. Some days I hardly notice it, having lived, breathed and moved in its shadow for so long. But at other times it still impinges, unwelcome, upon my consciousness: when I walk into the lunchroom and don’t understand the conversation with its jokes and innuendoes; when I try to make awkward conversation in Tagalog with the lady I buy vegetables from; or when my opinions on how we should live together as community seem to conflict with those of others.

The first few months of working in the place where I have my ministry now was an especially interesting experience. As a Singaporean with a background in law, newly venturing into research and advocacy on social issues in the Philippines with colleagues who were sociologists, I felt quite often like a fish out of water and unsure of myself. One day as I was relating this to a companion, she asked, “Well, what do you think then that you contribute to people at your workplace?”

I was quite stumped by the question. “Oh,” I fumbled, “trying to do my best, maybe?”

“It’s your difference,” she said. “You come with a different way of doing things; of looking at the world. Perhaps it would help if you realised that your difference is not just a burden but also a gift.”

What she said stuck with me. The idea of difference as gift was not something I had thought of before, and is something that continues to liberate in the moments where I unintentionally find myself comparing myself with others.

Perhaps it is also an important insight in our world today where so much conflict seems to arise from difference. We read about migrants being stopped at borders, people being killed in mosques and churches, and rising intolerance in many societies. But difference goes beyond just culture or religion: it is also a matter of class, age, personality, orientation, attitudes…

What would it take for us to realise that the difference of the other person – especially those whom we instinctively fear – has something to offer us; is also a gift? Perhaps it may first ask of us some humility to acknowledge our own fear and prejudices, and then the courage to see beyond them.

And what would it take for us to realise that our own difference – the unique way in which we are present in the world – is also a gift? Perhaps, when we are able set aside the ways in which we compare ourselves to others, and the expectations we have of perfection, we may yet realise – to our surprise – that God has given us a particular voice with which to speak the divine Word into our world, a world which hungers so deeply for it?