Postcard from America #1
I write this from America—a sunny beach in Florida to be exact. And while I'm on holidays, someone suggested that I may well still be noticing things, so here I am.
We've been here about three days, and the main thing I've noticed (besides the haziness of having a differently wound body clock, and how many things are ‘just like the movies’), is just how rich this country is. I've had two meals at restaurants here—and they've both lived up to the stereotype of American food: rich, overwhelmingly huge servings, and nutrutional value as if someone had studied the food pyramid and decided to demolish it with a truck.
And there's no shortage of variety of places to commit artery murder: on a thirty minute drive to the beach, there were probably about twenty-five different fast-food chains.
And so I sat in my Australian smugness, thinking how lucky I was that I didn't live here, thinking how much better I was having seen a vegetable that wasn't a fried potato or a gherkin. In short, thinking like a Samaritan.
Then I realized that these are exactly the same thoughts that many people must think, when they are immigrants to Australia: how rich must this country be to have a restaurant within a half hour drive? How rich must this people be to know where their next meal comes from?
Here's the rub: we aren't called to be the insiders or the comfortable ones. In a lot of ways, the eyes of a traveller are the right eyes for a Christian to have. Not just to notice the things that we aren't used to, but to notice the things that aren't right.
It was a great reminder to me, to remember that we are called to be strangers, for whom the things of this world are nothing. Called to be travellers, waiting for our home ... for just a little while longer.