Drink Pray Love

Surprise! I'm back in the States! Two months of living abroad came to pass in what I can only describe as a whirlwind. This season of my life has been one that may seem paradoxical to many, but it has been stretching and immensely significant for me. My heart has been strengthened, my view of the world widened, and my understanding of humanity heightened. I am beyond thankful for the opportunity I had to study abroad, even if the experience was quite different from what I expected.

Germany was a very Eat Pray Love-ish experience for me (minus the whole falling in love in a hut thing). Some of the best conversations I've ever had about God were held over cider in an Irish pub. The strongest I've ever felt the presence of God was in the Katholische Kirche St. Peter und Paul in Potsdam, and I felt strangely alive when I lit a prayer candle in honor and remembrance of Jesus in Munich. I felt sound peace while my heart was being wrenched, and found that my faith is strong enough to endure challenges and questioning. (I suppose a movie about my time abroad would be more suitably titled Drink Pray Love, right?)

I experienced life as a cultural outsider which made me so much more empathetic toward immigrants and refugees, and I even gained a small understanding of what it must be like to be an English Language Learner in an American classroom. Spoiler alert! It's really damn hard. There were days when I was so overwhelmed by language and cultural barriers that I could barely function, and other days I felt as if I had lived in Germany for my whole life. My legs eventually quit getting sore from walking everywhere I needed to go and I learned the local bus route like the back of my hand, but I still missed driving around alone listening to the Liturgist, and Vance Joy. While I was in Europe I missed my stateside people, and now that I'm home I miss the people I did life with in Europe. I miss sitting down with my housemates every night for hot apfel tee and eating currywurst at the fresh market on Saturdays. I miss returning my Coca-Cola bottles for money at the Lidl grocery store, but not scurrying to bag my own groceries while the cashier tells me the total I owe in a language I do not speak. I miss so many things, and no matter where I go there will always be someone or something for me to miss.

If you ask me, this is the way we humans are wired. We are designed to crave, to want, to miss. There is a certain hollowness within us that we spend the entirety of our lives trying to fill, but this hollowness within us is not evil. It exists to draw us closer to one another and to God, to remind us that what we can see and feel is not all there is to life.