Changing Your Perspective By Being Gone

There’s a lot of directions I could go with that title, but we are going to go with what a friend emailed with today. 

"As I continue to let the fact that I am halfway across the world sink into my system, I am coming to realize how much this opportunity...will change my life forever, including my views on culture, luxuries / necessities, food, and life in general."   

And it made me smile because this is what I try to tell people whenever they ask about my time abroad.  What do you want me to tell you?  That it was amazing, wonderful, and hard.   That I learned.  That I’m different.  I’m changed.   

These changes just happen.  Just like the way that you change as you grow up and maybe the way you were in second grade with your best friend is not going to be the way that you are when you are 45 with your best friend.  Let’s hope not! There is something valuable about being gone.  About placing yourself outside a situation and outside what is going on in this country, in this city, at this time, at this specific place.  I think that's why we have imaginations.  And I think that's why God created our imaginations to be a tool.  They can help us to be able to adapt to that place.  He gave us imaginations and other tools so that he could change us.  That might be a round-about way of saying that...let me know if I need to connect the dots better. Everything we do, every situation that we are placed into changes us. 

While writing this I even found some of my own perspectives changing.  I’m not a fantasy person, I love The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe, but that's as far as I go.  I like things to be logical.  And let me tell you the imagination is not logical, but my imagination is a tool.  It allows me to empathize with others and envision what life might be like say...in Torino, Italy…right now.