monday.

“… a radical life begins with the premise that I exist for God and for his purposes, not my own.”

                    – Dan Allender

This phrase caught my eye when skimming back through November’s journal entries.

I could personalize it right now by saying, “I am in this country because I exist for God and for his purposes, not my own.”

That is a great comfort to my weary heart this morning.

The other enormous comfort is that I am sitting and writing in my own living room.  Yes, that’s right – after a nomadic month-and-a-half I finally have a living room again.  A whole three-bedroom apartment even.

We worked like dogs our entire first week here in order to get into our own place.  And last night, sitting at our new dining room table with the kids sleeping in their bedroom, and a feast of buttered chicken take-out before me on my own new white dishes, all I could feel was … exhausted.  A deep, to-the-bone exhaustion.

It was infinitely worth it.  But it has taken its toll.  And this will be a week of catching up on rest.

We just entered “winter” here in our city, which means that there is a gorgeous light breeze drifting through the open balcony window to my right.  I can look outside and see it stirring the palm trees and the clear water in the swimming pool down below us.

We are on the second floor, and last night I learned that the big difference between this and the Goodriches’ seventh floor penthouse is the noise.  We are much more in the thick of things down here and get the noise from the neighborhood outside our apartment complex walls, the temple just down the street, the dogs barking during the day and fighting late at night, and our neighbors above and around us, slamming doors, calling out to one another, scraping chairs on the tiled floors.

Basically, there is a lot of noise all the time.

That is just one of the things I find overwhelming right now.

Another is the smell.  There always seems to be a mixture of foreign smells … even when we close our windows and turn the air conditioners on.  I haven’t identified them all … trash burning, neighbors cooking with garlic, garbage and souring food.  There is never a time when I can’t detect some sort of smell.

Then there’s the dust.  It is shocking how much dust there is here.  It gathers in the crevices of my flip-flops and between my toes whenever I walk outside.  It gets in my nose and throat and makes my eyes burn when we drive in the city.  I can see its particles floating in my contact solution when I go to put them on in the morning.

When I first arrived, I could not understand why Keli and Colleen’s house helper sweeps and mops their floors six days a week; now I understand.  I thoroughly dusted all our furniture yesterday afternoon, and when I awoke this morning, it was all already coated with a fine layer.   And, though in this country everyone removes shoes when entering a house, my bare feet feel the dirt already gathering on our floors as I walk around our apartment.

This morning I am torn.  I am soaking in the peace and space and delicious breeze of our new apartment.

But I feel like a stranger in a very strange land.

I am so helpless and ignorant and overwhelmed.  The list of things I need to learn just to function on a basic level here grows longer by the hour.

I miss my family so bad it hurts.

Will this city ever feel like home?