We were recently asked if we liked living in the city where we used to live. The answer is a long one. Let's start with some pictures from our trip back there.
We connected with precious friends - amazing answers to long standing requests.
We thoroughly enjoyed reconnecting with our friends on Sunday evening!
We introduced B to some of our old friends.
And he made some new friends of his own.
We visited our friendly neighborhood water buffalo.
We enjoyed the mountains and the sunsets.
We re-visited some old traditions.
And started some new ones.
We went for a walk in our old neighborhood and talked to Dad about the people who live there, people we were hoping to talk to one day.
We enjoyed the apartment we rented for 18 months and lived in for 20 days.
Our kids especially enjoyed the bedroom that would have been theirs all last year.
We took the time to smell the flowers.
We rested a little bit.
We packed a lot! And cleaned. I actually spent a lot of time wiping mold off all the books, games, and bookshelves in J's office. The people that stayed in our house "fixed" the solar water in the kitchen sink and flooded the bookshelf. And instead of telling anyone, they put up cardboard. Frustrating! Anyways moving on..
And then we said goodbye to our city.
And we said goodbye to our friends.
And we moved away to another city. And it was only then I realized how much I liked our old city. Though rife with frustrations of both the interpersonal and material nature, our time there was good and profitable. At the time it was hard to see just how good and how profitable it really was. But that's human nature, at least my human nature, always wishing I was somewhere else or doing something else or even that I could be someone else entirely...
In the end my humanity sells me short because my human eyes fail to see what really is. Being in the now isn't about signing onto some trendy hipster slogan. It's about believing that who I am, where I am, what I am - these are not accidents. I can choose joy today because today was planned by someone whose a far better planner than me.
I miss our old city every day. I miss things I didn't even know I liked when we were living there. I miss people I didn't even know liked me. I miss food that I assumed they had all over this country. I miss how hard life was there: relational drama, sickness, exhaustion, feeling completely misunderstood at every turn, it drove us to our knees and into the arms of the only one who understands everything we go through and loves us in spite of all our immaturity. I miss that tangible dependency.
I'm thankful for all we learned while we were there, all that we were able to take away from that city. I'm especially thankful that on the days I'm tempted to wish we lived there instead of here or anywhere instead of here, I can remember that I was wrong when I thought that when we lived there. As a reminder to chose joy now because of things we can't see, we included one of the characters from the name of our old city into Benaiah's local name. It's excellent! We're pretty excited about it! More on that in another post.