In 1997 my family moved from Canada to the United States. The transition was pretty smooth and we made the necessary adjustments in culture and so on. One transition was both immediate and continuous (even to this day) for me. It revolves around the spoken word: that thing we call an “accent.” Both my wife and I would actually get tired of having people tell us how much we said “eh.” That is until we flew back to visit family after a couple of years, boy do those Canadians say “eh” an awful lot!!!
What I found interesting is that to my ear there are some words that sound so incredibly different that making the change is as simple as saying a different word. Hmmmm, how to demonstrate this in a text-based format… let’s try phonetics:
Take for example the word process. In the US (okay maybe not the Bayou) it would be pronounced “pr-ah-cess” while in The Great White North it would be “pr-O-cess.” I can hear the difference between these two words like I can hear the difference between the words red and blue. However, there are a handful of words that I still struggle with: out for example.
Sticking with the word process, I noticed something during those first few years: when I was speaking, I would say it the “American” way, but while I was reading I would still read it the “Canadian” way!
Then a few years later, I noticed that I was reading it the American way! Don’t know when that happened, but my thinking had been changed!
God doesn’t want just our actions to change, he wants us to be changed in our thinking! Paul writes in Romans 12:2 that we are to be transformed by the renewing of our mind. It isn’t enough to change the outside without affecting our internal value structure!
In an interesting twist of God’s will, we are now in the pr-O-cess of moving back to Canada… another transformation in thinking will have to take place.
