Weird When It Starts To Feel A Little Like Home...

I received a newsletter from my dear friend Kristi recently. Kristi is a fellow journeyman living in Central Asia. It’s a blessing to have all these fellow, single, 2 year term friends to bond with and share experiences with. She wrote this article in her newsletter which, if you just replaced just a few minor details, is exactly how I have come to feel living here. Please read and enjoy a glimpse of what living overseas can do to you :-)

Its an odd feeling the day you say to yourself, ‘America is a strange place’. I’ve spent many waking and sleeping hours since living here dreaming of home...the land of convenient big box retailers, and people working in those stores that I can easily communicate with..grocery stores with entire aisles dedicated to cereal...restaurants with cuisine from every corner of the globe. The land where traffic laws are obeyed, violators are ticketed, and sidewalks are reserved for pedestrians only. The land where everything is a set rate and I don’t have to budget for the foreigner price. Yes, the land where I can always get the right change, where repairmen actually come when they say they are going to and fix things so that they don’t need repair again within the week. Where what I buy won’t rip apart or break the moment I get it home... many days I have missed America. But somewhere along the way, while daydreaming about home...something changed. Sometimes I realize this change when I’m out and I think, “Its only a few miles, we can just walk.” Or when I go into one of the small businesses below my apartment building and just smile, happy that the owner is pleased to do anything to help me, when before I only got frustrated that I had to go to about 10 of these little stores to get the same things I could easily get back home at one. There will just be things I’m going to miss here. For example, in America there are no fruit vendors on the street at midnight selling a kilo of fresh peaches the size of a softball for 70 cents. I can’t get bread fresh from the oven anytime i want it for 25 cents a loaf. I can’t hit the local bazaar and find a veritable rainbow of the best produce I’ve ever seen or tasted (and yes, I can taste it before I buy it). And, after all...why do I need every cuisine in the world when this one has to be one of the finest there is? Sometimes it takes a visiting foreigner to help me see things the way I used to see them again. Oh, and they quickly remind me how loud and animated Americans are. Don’t get me wrong, I love my country and I love being another loud American, but I’ve learned to love the chaos of this city while I long for the countryside. To appreciate a land with more history in one nook than in my whole homeland put together. I’ve learned to love this place and when I return to the beautiful land of cowboys and chain restaurants and big boxes I’ll miss the gypsy lady selling flowers downstairs, and the way people pass the hours having conversation over tea and backgammon. And then I realize, that when I return to America, I won’t be finished dreaming about home. Because, as I’m learning, home is more than a place. It’s more than a heritage. I can be home here. I can be content here, and this gives me great assurance that I can be home no matter where He asks me to go, and I am reminded that neither this land nor the one from which I came is my true home anyway, and my hope is that I would not live as though it were. Home is coming, that is where I long to be, but as it is, it is not yet where I’m called to be...so brothers and sisters, love the blessings of home, but don’t live for them. For those that would follow Him another home awaits, one far grander, and one that makes every beautiful thing of this world pale in comparison. Longing for home...