living & visiting

I am adjusting. Slowly, this week, Paris has begun to feel more like a home. I have found my grocery store, the best boulangerie nearby, my running path. I have my route to get to school and back, my favorite little stops (so far, at least) and some new, sweet friends. And somewhere between setting up my little French coffee maker and hanging pictures on the wall - I found myself thinking about this concept of home - the difference between living and visiting. 

I still feel like a foreigner and a tourist, which I suppose I am and will continue to be for a while, but I also have a little apartment here and a monthly metro card, so this earns me some sort of squatter's rights, oui? Last week, amongst a slew of particularly cheerful texts from friends and family about how much they love Paris and how pretty it all is and how exciting it must be, how much they loved it when they came - I felt my stomach hollow a little. Because it truly wasn’t all as lovely and picturesque as everyone was telling me it was for them. And I thought about the way in which when we visit a place, we pick and choose, we decide to go see the good, but we don’t stay long enough for the bad or difficult. 

Think about it. You take a trip, you plan to see all the major sights, to stay at a good hotel, to taste all the iconic food, and then you take your pictures and postcards and memories, and you go home. 

But then there is living. Actually existing in a space for an extended period of time, navigating the ins and outs of life in that place. And the major sights become part of your new landscape, part of your new normal, a background to the life you are living and the relationships you are cultivating, and the ways in which you are growing. Yes the Eiffel Tower and Champs-Élysées are so COOL, but I have to grocery shop. I have to clean my apartment. I have to buy toilet paper. It isn’t all sparkly like the tower every hour. 

That is sort of what New York was like at first too. An abundant, iconic place that so many loved to visit, but feared to live. People almost always tell me of New York, “oh I LOVE to visit the City, but I could NEVER live there.” And while it took adjustment, it happened, and the Apple became a home too. Skyscrapers have become my sidewalk companions, bright lights help me find my way home, bridges connect me to my friends in other boroughs. 

And maybe all this is to teach me something larger in life. That I am to make a home in the communities I am given, not just remain a passerby, a visitor. Even though it is far easier, and less risky to remain on the surface with people and in life. Where have I been neglecting to steward well, to lean in, to set roots? And why? Fearful of rejection, of the hard work that accompanies making a home somewhere or with some people? I have always been one to have a lot of friend groups, things I love to do, and places to be. But in this season, one where I am asked to stand still, it’s a challenge - for with a home, comes the vulnerability of actually being known. Setting roots means deciding to endure seasons and weather in that spot, good and bad.

And so, these things about Paris and the wonderful beauty is not just something to see, but something I exist amidst. And while it’s tempting to write off this time as a few months of traveling and taking classes and eating warm carbs, I am resisting this. Because home can be here too. I have been called to live here at this moment in time, not just to pass through, but to press in. To dig my feet in and see what happens when I tend to the garden around me. 

I was reading in Joshua yesterday about Joshua’s call. God says to him near the beginning of the book, “Every place that the sole of your foot will tread on I have given to you”(1:3), and later He says “Do not be frightened or dismayed for I am with you wherever you go”(1:9). I felt God encouraging me to lean into my surroundings. I am to make this place a home, a place of rest (1:13), at least for now. I am to navigate the difference between the living and the visiting - and I am not to fear. Home (at least for now) is here.