20 Days

Erin has now been back in the U.S. for 20 days. Well, 19 since the entire first day of March was spent in airplanes flying over the ocean. Time has gone by fast and in slow motion all at once. Since this is now the longest stretch of time we have been away from the Netherlands, our minds and hearts are pretty convinced of the permanence of this move back to Texas.

We moved back into the house a week ago today. By now most things are put away, organized, and clean. Of course, we’re still missing a lot of clothes and other items that should be on their way over here from Amsterdam. Amazingly there is apparently no way for the moving company to track our shipment of goods across the ocean, so it could be another couple weeks or another month before it all gets here. Why, we wonder, can’t this shipment be tracked when UPS tracks absolutely everything going anywhere all over the planet? The arrival of our effects will just have to be a surprise.

John is still enjoying his job, and now that he is out of the hotel he lived in for a month and back in the house, he describes his adjustment back to life here as “seamless.” Erin’s experience is much different. Fortunately she only had to live in a hotel for 1 ½ weeks. Even though she is living in a city she has lived in before, in a house she has lived in before, something seems weird. Just a little weird. She finally decided that things are weird because almost everything in her life is different now…except the environment, which is also not exactly the same now that she views things through eyes with 18 months of experience living on a different continent. Erin will have to find a new job, a new church, and new friends. She’ll have different colleagues, different volunteer opportunities, and a different schedule than she ever did when she lived here before. She’s even driving a different car. This is all not much different than we expected; the one thing we are certain of in life is that there will always be changes.