Stress, inappropriately managed and too intense for too long, also cripples. The American Institute of Stress (sounds ike a fun place to work...) reports that up to 75-90% of all visits to family doctors are related to stress. ⁱ Stress is in no way a mental problem only; it is empirically proven to affect virtually every system in your body. Additionally. I believe it is one of the ways our enemy can drive a wedge between us and our God or His mission, significantly impacting our souls as well.

Cross-cultural workers are an inordinately stressed-out bunch of people. Illustrations, explanations, and reasons for this abound. I’ve created a three-minute video explanation of some of them here (“Cross Cultural Stress”). Hamilton Burke explains in The Intense Stress of International Service (a very useful read for workers and churches alike!) that if a typical new worker were to consider their life on the Social Readjustment Rating Scale (SRRS), they would score 463 ⁱⁱ .

Specially Stressed

Before diving into this list, let me begin with a caveat – I am aware that many of the things about which I’m writing below affect people everywhere and not just on the field. They are on the list, though, because they either affect international workers in a unique way or in ways that are especially difficult to address from the field.

• Feeling inadequate or incompetent: First-day-on-the-job jitters are a real thing. When your job description is ‘all things to all people to win a few,’ that adds a special level of panic to the experience! What makes this stressor such a challenge is that it is true. If a team is tackling Kingdom work in the right way, they are inadequate. Most of the worthwhile things in life are those that are bound to fail if God doesn’t show up in a special way. That truth, though, is hard to embrace in daily life.

• Language barriers: Language learning is not humbling; it’s humiliating. Educated, functional leaders in their communities and churches (people worthy of your support!) show up on the field and are immediately unable to find a bathroom or buy bread. Additionally, there’s the extra challenge of learning culture that must accompany language learning. Never forget that dealing with bad days in your second (or third) language is always going to be that much harder.

• Culture stress: Culture shock is about a moment, a specific interaction that catches you off-guard and causes you to retreat either from the situation or from good manners (yes, I’ve done both). Long-term culture stress builds over time as things like differences in values, conceptions of time, importance of task and relationship, individualistic and communal demands, etc., reveal themselves. Unless cross-cultural workers adapt (and adopt!), culture stress will ultimately prove more difficult to deal with than surprising foods and are much harder to put into words for their senders to understand.

• Financial pressure: As workers raise their funds in answer to their calling, they battle all kinds of stereotypes. One of the most harmful of these is the idea that they ought to be poor, that they should live check-to-check while on support. Not only do we not expect this to be the aim of any other career choice, it actually winds up impeding their ability to serve because precious resources are spent in constant worry or fund raising or both.

• Family concerns: Global workers are ultimately regular people following an extraordinary calling. They experience struggles in being single/newly-weds/young parents/parents of teenagers, too. The difference is that discerning the best school option for your third grader or launching your high school senior or discovering how to care for your aging parents is only made more difficult when done across time zones and language or culture barriers.ⁱⁱⁱ

• Role or identity change: In a peculiar (though not entirely unique) way, being a cross-cultural worker is both a job and an identity. You are one to a much greater extent than you do it, something that people who leave their work behind at 5:00 have difficulty understanding. This challenge affects people on both ends of their career on the field, both as they transition in and as they transition out…which brings me to my next point!

• Constant transition: Transition is the name of the game in cross-cultural work. While I often coach people in what it takes to progress across the transition bridge, the reality is that the people moving between worlds rarely are able to settle; they always know on some level that they are impermanent.

• Transportation difficulties: International workers are more likely to be injured or killed in a traffic accident than from disease, persecution, terrorism, and crime put together! ^iv Combine that fact with the challenges of finding reliable transportation while living abroad, and suddenly your commute to work seems less daunting. Governmental inefficiency: Imagine your absolute worst experience with getting your driver’s license renewed. Get rid of the air conditioning. Multiply the number of people in line ahead of you by five (and, while you’re at it, get rid of the idea of ‘lines’). Consider the fact that the officer who gives you a form does not have the required stamps for it. Do it in your third language. Now bind all of it together with an understanding of spiritual opposition to your success. At this point you have a small taste of what getting a visa renewed is like.

• Governmental inefficiency: Imagine your absolute worst experience with getting your driver’s license renewed. Get rid of the air conditioning. Multiply the number of people in line ahead of you by five (and, while you’re at it, get rid of the idea of ‘lines’). Consider the fact that the officer who gives you a form does not have the required stamps for it. Do it in your third language. Now bind all of it together with an understanding of spiritual opposition to your success. At this point you have a small taste of what getting a visa renewed is like.

• Life/Ministry balance: Not many of us excel at maintaining healthy boundaries; people in ministry fail even more often. Those with a sense of urgency for the lost and for the expansion of the Kingdom struggle even more. In some sense, many global workers live with the (self-imposed) pressure that any rest or vacation they take is a sign of weakness and damages the expansion of the Kingdom. It’s a lie, and it’s unhealthy, but it’s pretty widespread.

• Living with risk: International living is complicated. Those who take it on for Kingdom reasons do so with an enemy who hates them and the God they serve and who works tirelessly to hurt or expel them. Being constantly situationally and spiritually aware takes a toll.

ⁱ https://www.stress.org/americas-1-health-problem

ⁱⁱ Burke, Hamilton. The Intense Stress of International Service. Page 47.

ⁱⁱⁱ Thankfully there is ongoing research into the special stressors missionaries feel. For instance, here is a link to a survey you or your worker could participate in to help researchers understand the challenges of serving aging parents from the field.

^iv Burke, 78.