Can you spot the foreigner?

Collected some sea glass yesterday.

Finding the green pieces among the millions of stones & pebbles was easy.

The greenish blue pieces weren’t terribly hard to find either.

This is one of the best beaches I've ever seen if you want to find enormous 

quantities of sea glass ... and it's a 5 minute walk from our house. 

Among the millions of rocks & pebbles, the glass pieces seem few

and far between, until they start to add up in your pocket.

Then, among the millions of rocks & pebbles,

one white one stood out.

I pocketed it with the pieces of glass.

My pocket filled quickly, and as it did, 

I thought of that one white pebble.

Surrounded by glass, mostly green with a bit of blue.

Imported out of its comfortable majority of stones,

Suddenly isolated. 

Different.

Jostled, engulfed, immersed...

Standing out like a…

like a pebble in a sea of glass.

East doesn’t just meet west here…

it engulfs and overwhelms it,

it rarely pauses to consider your presence.

When noticed, there are stares, comments, laughter,

and the occasional bold child who wants to show off his three English phrases.

I no longer feel the difference by skin color alone, 

but rather by something almost chemical.

 If minerality = humanity, then it is easy enough to recognize our common ground.

But consider the ages long difference in process.

  

Sea Glass – a collection of minerals, heated, processed, liquefied, blown, solidified, commodified, utilized, set adrift, broken, pulverized, worn down, washed ashore.

= any particular Asian culture ... or, particularly, Korean culture.

The Pebble  – a mineral, broken off some larger piece of the same, worn down, washed ashore.

= in this case, me and my white family in a city of 4.4 million Koreans.

by recent stats Americans here in Busan are less than .05% of the population.

and all expats combined are less than .75% 

- over half of the 33,000 foreigners are also Asian (Chinese, Koreans born in China, Vietnamese, etc)

What would the pebble & glass say to each other about their history? 

Is what they have in common even enough to merit starting such a conversation?

Is this what my Korean friends mean when they say 

– you can’t truly understand the way we are?  

 I know that I want to try.  

 We’re only minerals  human after all. 

Broken.

Washed ashore.

Still tumbled by the waves.

Picked up by a divine hand.

Placed in the pocket of providential care.

Kept.

…and yes, 

put on display… 

in His blog, 

the Church.