JOY (and tom cruise)

So today I had some great news.

I have been a bit miserable where I've been living for a while. I mean, not crying miserable, but it's not that nice and there are often drunk tramps hanging out far and in the lift and the lift doesn't always work and my letter box doesn't have a working lock etc etc etc. And I'm just not a fan of living on my own, so it seems.

Anyway, I've been half keeping an eye out for places to move to: looking in the pages of the service booklet for church, asking around, sometimes meandering through wg-gesucht.de etc ... and in December what seemed to be a perfect flat popped up - cheap, nice people to live with, great area ... anyway (obviously) they in the end said no because I wasn't there for long enough.

And so the "not being there long enough" question has kind of haunted my search ever since. Then, seemingly out of the blue, a new girl joined my house group (from the SMD - once a fortnight Bible study) ... when I say new, she's not new to me, she's just new to this particular group ... and one of her prayer points was to sort out the stress with her housemate moving out and having to decide who to take as the replacement. One of the other girls in the group, knowing I was mildly unhappy, suggested me as a replacement and so I went and looked round. I found it really hard to react to it because it was pretty much perfect in that it was near an excellent transport link to school, was nice and cosy and girly inside, location is really near most of my teammates, and most of all she is GREAT and is a strong Christian too ... but I didn't want her to feel under pressure. So then this awkward week followed when I bumped into her a few times and didn't know what to say... arggh ....

She told me she'd tell me today. But she wasn't at church. I took it as a sign. In fact, the sign was the opposite. Having eaten a pretty darn cheap and yummy vietnamese lunch I got a phonecall, and, heart thumping, took it, and it was from Christine saying YES PLEASE live with me. JOY!

What was really wonderful out of all this was how I just had to learn that God had it all in control - all he was asking me to do was trust him. Not sit back and do nothing trust, but search and find the doors (figuratively speaking) and let God open them. I had no control over whether Christine would say yes or not. I had no idea why God didn't let me get this other flat back in November and made me go through more annoyance and frustration here. But what I do know is that Romans 8:28 is ringing very true for me today:

And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him,
who have been called according to his purpose.

And I also went to see Valkyrie. I saw it in English because the dubbed version in adverts FREAKED me out - don't want Germans dubbing a film about themselves - I wasn't bowled over by it mainly because it seemed more of a homage to Tom Cruise than von Stauffenberg, and I'm not a huge fan of Tom Cruise. Also I didn't massively find Bill Nighy and Eddie Izzard credible as
(nice) Nazis... but anyway, what it did make me think about was how this ALL happened in and around Berlin. And what scars this city bears. Not only the physical ones - although the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtniskirche is an obvious reminder - but also the emotional ones. Not everyone knows that Mohrenstrasse was built using some marble from Hitler's bunker, not everyone knows where what happened but there is always the lingering ghost of both the Second World War and in the DDR time afterwards, something which is highlighted to me when I see Hollywood trying to reenact it.