home

It's amazing how travel can lead to such an appreciation of home. For instance, after traveling to Germany, I am filled with thankfulness that God has not yet called me to a place where I would have to eat herring on a regular basis. I know, like Paul, through Christ I could learn to be content in all situations, but the herring thing would be really, really hard.

Germany was a wonderful experience though. The herring was about the only thing I couldn't stomach. I learned to like sparkling water (or "water with gas" as they call it), butter on my lunchmeat sandwiches, and pedal brakes on adult bicycles. I found that I can watch movies in a foreign language and still enjoy them and learn from them. A live performace of Romeo and Juliet is just as heartbreaking in German as it is in English. I learned I need to recycle more and ride my bike to work more.

But there is no place like home. I learned to like butter on lunchmeat, but I still prefer mayo. I learned to like sparkling water, but I still prefer it "without the gas." And, looking back on my anxiousness to return home, I think of all of the time I spent with international students in college and wonder why it never occured to me to try, even in small ways, to make things more like their homes. It was so refreshing to land in Memphis and be able to read the signs posted around me and to walk up to a shop counter with confidence that the person on the other side would speak English. To be able to easily understand what was going on around me. To easily be able to find and purchase food I like prepared the way I prefer it. In college, I think I was so busy trying to introduce my international friends to my culture, I never really appreciated how much they must have longed for home. Oh sure, I would sit and listen as they talked about home and made a conscious effort to learn from them, but I never really tried and thought about bringing their homes to them.

I love home. I remember upon returning from Scotland a few years ago, Kristen Browning and I shouting and screaming and skipping and turning around in circles in a McDonald's parking lot because we were in America and we could act as silly as we wanted. We no longer had to be on our best behavior because we were in someone else's country, we no longer had to sit and observe just to figure out what was going on (even though we spoke the same language there), we were no longer visitors in a foreign place. I love home because of the sense of comfort, the sense of belonging, the sense of ownership. I wish I could go back in time and try to give that to my international friends. Nothing I could do would make this foreign land home, but maybe at least that understanding would have helped bridge the chasm between the international students and the American students. Maybe I could have shared just a taste of what different students from different countries already shared so deeply in being strangers in a foreign land.