Flashes of unease

So far I haven't experienced homesickness per se, I suppose it's been more of a lingering annoyance that things aren't quite as I'd expect, and so effort is required to see from the German perspective. Only today did I get really cross with everything when I didn't have enough money to pay for the deposit for my flat and I only had an hour before the office shut in which time I had to find a cash point and get more money out. Cash points are really few and far between in Germany, though, and when I did eventually find one my card wasn't accepted. I managed to get the money with 5 minutes to spare, but it totally exhausted me (probably because I hadn't eaten a proper breakfast) and made me just want to go home and curl up in my own bed with my own duvet and a glass of milk (milk, incidentally, is also weird here)

It got me thinking, though, that in this hour or so of unease, what am I homesick for? What I missed at that moment in time was not people, nor relationships, but the comfort that I have when living in a country whose language I can completely manage even when tired, whose idiosyncracies I can understand and work around and whose facilities suit what I expect.

I have become so entrenched in my own comfort zone that I cannot actually cope when things go slightly differently than planned. Yes, obviously when I have lots of time and am well fed and not tired, little annoyances don't affect me at all. But this cannot be the normal situation. My comfort zone is something I've created so precisely so that if ever anything were to go wrong I'd know exactly where to turn to to resolve it immediately. But coming from a small, intimate English university town to a big impersonal city like Berlin where I know nobody and nobody seems to know anybody else has meant that this feeling of being safe has been swept away from underneath me.

Yet it was Jesus that did this ultimately. Leaving his comfort-zone in heaven, he came down to earth not as a king or powerful ruler as he could so easily have done, but as a crying baby in a manger, a baby who grew up anonymous amongst those he had created and died without the recognition he deserved so that there would no longer be alienation between God and man. Jesus endured the ultimate wrench away from his natural heavenly home in order to bring us into in forever - and so this makes me wonder why on earth I should be feeling like perhaps my life could be better spent elsewhere.

Hebrews 11:8-10 tells us that "by faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going. By faith he made his home in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country; he lived in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise. For he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God."

At the moment I am living as a stranger in a foreign country, but both this country and the place I call home are but built on sand - the true city is the one with foundations, and it is our inheritance that will never perish, spoil or fade and does not depend on the whims of foreign cash machines.