When I went back to college after being gone for two years, I didn't know if I would make close friends. I was commuting, and probably the oldest person in my classes (I thought), but nobody knew that. Not at first, anyway.

I had English Grammar Tuesdays and Thursdays, and I always loved watching this girl in the front row. Her dark curls, crisp and perfect, shook when she laughed--which she did, often, even at herself. She was willing to ask questions, and admit what she didn't know. I liked her.

One day, coming out of class, we started talking. I was telling her how kids should be empowered to learn even if they struggle, and she told me how she helped her husband (who has dyslexia) get through firefighter training by reading all his textbooks aloud and recording them.

"All his textbooks?" I said.

"Yeah, that was what he needed, so I did that for him." She laughed. "He said that sometimes I would almost fall asleep as I was reading, or I'd just start laughing at the stuff in the textbook. But he listened to the tapes over and over, and got through."

I couldn't believe it. I read one textbook to a classmate once, and it wore me out. (I also had no idea she was married, and had kids!)

Later I told her that I was dating, and trying to decide if I should have a career if I get married. "I come from a really conservative culture, where women are encouraged to stay home and take care of the kids."

"Oh, really? Me too."

"Wait," I said, "What culture are you from?"

"Oh." She hesitated, "I'm Mormon. I wasn't sure if I could talk about my church here. Another friend of mine came here, and she felt like she couldn't talk about her faith at all."

I'll be honest: I didn't know what to think. I had read about the Mormon faith, and had developed reservations about some of their beliefs.

Yet I had visited a Mormon church service when I was doing research on different worldviews in a college class. While their service had a lot of cultural elements I didn't understand (mainly the church hierarchy and the discussion about the Book of the Mormon), they talked about Jesus, and shared the Eucharist. They talked about what the church was doing to serve the community, and each other. It reminded me more of my church than I expected.

Kari and I talked about our differences. She told me what she loved about her church, and how well her kids were doing in their religious classes. I told her about my church, and how much I appreciated having a supportive community.

And while we didn't change each other's minds, we gradually began to see that we both loved Jesus, and wanted to serve Him.

That feels scary to some of you reading this, I suppose. I'm not surprised. I'm not trying to make some kind of relativistic statement about sincerity mattering more than truth.

What I began to realize last year is that God is a really big God.

He meets people in many different cultures.

I started reflecting on this last spring, when my friends, Kristy and Rachel, decided to join Kari and I on a trip to Michigan for the Festival of Faith and Writing at Calvin College. Oh yeah, our professor, Aaron Brown, graciously chauffeured us in the fourteen hours each way. (Bless his patient heart.)

Oh! I haven’t told you about Rachel or Kristy.

Rachel intimidated me at first, because every time she talked in class, she said articulate, intelligent things, referencing Beowulf or The Great Gatsby, and other literature I ought to have read, and hadn’t. She was confident and funny. Which disarmed me, because she laughed at herself, too.

Also, she had long, beautiful, curly hair. Like I wanted when I was a little girl.

Kristy sat behind me in two of my classes, and commiserated with me. She always listened sympathetically, and said, “I know. It was hard. I wasn’t sure, either, what I should do!” whenever I was stressing out about an assignment. Eventually I caught on that she was being incredibly kind and humble, because she is actually an excellent student, but never flaunts it.

She also laughed at all my jokes, and I loved her dearly for it.

Anyway, back to the story.

We hadn't been in the van long when we started talking about church backgrounds, and Rachel told us what it was like to grow up in a really conservative Reformed church. She described their fear of assimilating into culture, and the controlling leadership.

"Oh," I thought. "So it's not just us Amish who struggle with that?"**

Kristy told us how often she has heard that she is not really a Christian because she grew up Catholic. One person even told her she is going to hell because of her beliefs.

"Do you really get to decide that?" Kristy thought.

That weekend, we all loved listening to the writers, artists, journalists, and publishers speak about how to care for our fractured culture. How to offer light--and grace. How to be artistic, nuanced, and faithful in our work.

I realized through our discussions after the sessions just how much we had in common.

I know. Kari grew up in a Mormon church, Rachel in Reformed churches, Kristy in a Catholic church, and I in an Amish Mennonite church. We're different. Really different.

But we all 'get' what it's like to grow up in a conservative culture, with cautions about what we ought to listen to, what we ought to watch, what we should and shouldn't wear. We all understand there is good in that, but that it can be taken too far. We love the people we grew up with, but we struggle with parts of what they taught us.

What I loved about our 'tribe,' as we call it now, was the genuine respect we had for each other. None of us would believe the silliness that says every belief is the same, and what matters is how sincere you are. But we recognize that we understand Christianity differently, and Jesus meets us in each of our cultures.

In that worldviews class I referred to earlier, my professor, Steven Brubaker, said,

"Think about truth this way: it is what is real, like the Earth. But we all come along and make maps of what we see, and each of our maps, our understanding of truth, are limited. We need to be humble. We need to submit our understanding of truth to Jesus, and His Word."

My tribe helps me to see how our maps are incomplete. We all want Jesus to redraw the contours we've skewed in our drawing.

Maybe He can use our differences to do that.

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**(Please don't hear me saying that my church or all Amish churches are like that. I'm saying that our conservative churches have those tendencies, at times.)