Love your What?

The other day a friend asked me how I was settling in here in Stockholm and I began to write a reply. I explained that having lived in Sweden before I should know the place well. I can speak the language and that really helps. But I also admitted that I had been gone for eleven years and that a lot had changed here in my absence. Living in Stockholm is also a new challenge. It is Sweden’s capital city, and before I had only lived in small Swedish towns.

One of my sons is finishing University in America soon and says that he really enjoys European culture better than American culture! What he means is that he actually feels like he understands the European mind set and ways better than the American. He has felt a little out of place in America these last five years, so...he is moving back to Sweden and wants to try living in the country that he lived in as a child. One of my other children has told me how they would much more prefer to live in America. Wow, how different my children are! One would like to live in America and one is moving back to Sweden.

How about me? Where would I most prefer to live? I am learning that... I like where ever I am as long as there are people I love there. That might sound strange but I actually believe it more and more. I have now lived in three very different countries in my life time. In each country I have lived I have been happy and enjoyed myself as long as I had people there that I loved.

Once a Pharisee asked Jesus, “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” Jesus replied: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

Now don’t get me wrong. I am not a perfect neighbor, far from it. And I also realize that I do not live among perfect neighbors, far from it. There are no perfect neighbors and no perfect people as far as that goes but I am still told to love them in spite of what they do or say. Sometimes it is easy to love and sometimes it is real job, but when I do it, it is amazing how fun life becomes and how much richer (humanly speaking) I become, when I get to know others that are much different then myself.

So how am I settling in? Well, I guess that depends on me more then where I live, or who I live beside.