Crisp air…gloved hands thrust deep into coat pockets…cars rushing past. I leaned against the same signpost, waited for the same bus, that I had countless times before. Nothing had changed.

But.

Everything.

Had.

Changed.

I didn’t live there anymore. Ireland was no longer my home.

But, then again, Amsterdam will soon cease to be home as well.

I wasn’t even sure I was supposed to be in Ireland.

A few weeks ago I found cheap tickets flying Ryanair into Dublin. At first I thought about visiting another country before I left Europe—I have this rather silly desire to add more countries to the list of those I’ve already visited. Yes, it’s a numbers game. My European friends here at the hostel would say that’s a very American trait. I usually try to avoid those qualifications as much as possible.

But I had a good excuse! Nicole, my Floridian friend whom I worked with at the Shelter, was finishing her time at the hostel and traveling around Europe for two weeks. The first leg of her journey would be to Zurich, where Cecilia, another friend and co-worker from Liechtenstein, had friends with a gift for hospitality.

Zurich proved too expensive, though. People may think that Amsterdam is a European hub-city for travel—we certainly get a lot of people stopping through on their way to other countries. But it is dang expensive to get from here to anywhere else on the mainland. Very sad.

Then I saw plane tickets for 50 euros to Dublin. Do I add another country to my growing, but still sadly short, list, or visit my friends in the land of 40 shades of green where I lived for 13 months?

The decision shouldn’t have been difficult.

Money was the deciding factor. Two of my friends from the hostel came along with me, and we had a fantastic time. I enjoyed showing them some of Ireland’s natural and historic beauty, as well as catching up with old friends.

Back to the bus stop.

Over the years and in my travels I’ve learned that I have quite different reactions to different kinds of trips. There are times when I love traveling alone, such as when I spent three days in Rome, and there are times when I would much rather have been with people, like in Barcelona. (Barcelona is not a city where you should be by yourself. And I don’t mean because it’s dangerous!)

I have a similar reaction to visitors. When friends or family visit me from another city or country, I usually prefer for them to come with other people. That means that I don’t have to cart them around and show them all the sights since two or more people are more likely to be proactive in doing that themselves. I don’t have to be the perpetual tour guide.

Yes. Very selfish. But I’m getting better!

Going to Ireland with Joost and Kurt—let me remind you that I had a great time with these guys—made me a little nervous since it combined the best and worst of these things. I was traveling with friends, which is great, but they were dependent on me to get them around and show them the sites. That also meant the catch-up time with my Irish friends was drastically cut.

So as I leaned against that cold signpost in the village of Lucan, thoughts whirled and bumped around the inside of my head like Charlie and his grandpa did in that original version of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory when they drank that fizzy drink: “Was I supposed to spend money to come to Ireland? I didn’t need to come here. Why does it feel like I’ve never even left?! That can’t be a normal feeling. I’m having some serious déjà vu here…�

The last thought was the weirdest. Well, not the one about déjà vu, but the one about how it felt like I’d never left. And at the exact same time I knew that I had a life in Amsterdam. A life that was ending soon, of course, but a life filled with friends, ministry, lessons to be learned, etc.

And very soon I will leave Holland. Which means my life will be in Israel. So when I visit Amsterdam, will I have the same feeling that I did leaning against the signpost in Ireland?

I think I will.

In Ireland and Amsterdam I’ve entered into life and all that God wants for me to live more than anywhere else in my previous seven years. And that life has not ended. It will not end. Do you remember that scene at the end of The Last Battle, the last book of C.S. Lewis’ Narnia series, where one of the characters noticed in “heaven� that a particular house still existed, although it had supposedly been destroyed?:

“Why,� exclaimed Peter. “It’s England. And that’s the house itself —Professor Kirk’s old home in the country where all our adventures began!�
“I thought that house had been destroyed,� said Edmund.
“So it was,� said the Faun. “But you are now looking at the England within England, the real England just as this is the real Narnia. And in that inner England no good thing is destroyed.�

Simplistic. Not particularly academic or theological. But it fits. The life I lived in Ireland is gone. My friends are doing different things. My old room is now a storeroom for broken chairs and computer boxes. There’s a McDonald’s down the road from where I lived. But the life I lived there is still growing within me. Better yet, it is me.

And the same thing will happen in Amsterdam. A year from now not a single staff member will remain who I worked with. The guests will obviously be different. And someone will probably paint the walls or do some weird thing with the computer system.

But my life here will remain.

I suppose I do have a home. Home is all around me.

It’s kind of fun to see the world as one big living room.

• • •

One last note:

I mentioned that I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to be in Ireland. That’s a legitimate question. We all make purchases that, in hindsight, we know we shouldn’t have made. And going on a trip is harder to quantify. How can I prove that an experience is worth a few hundred dollars when a few hundred dollars is so valuable?

But on that bus I finally boarded, the one I was waiting for with the confusing thoughts knocking around inside my noggin, I knew that I was supposed to be in Ireland. I sat in the back of that double-decker with the cool Irish breeze from an open window in my face. I closed my eyes. I’m sure I smiled. That was good…that was right.

And later, at my church home group, I sat among friends who laughed, talked, listened, and finally prayed for me. I felt at home.

I also felt that I was ending my time in Amsterdam the way that it had started and leaving for Israel in the best way possible—with the blessing from my church.

So how much is a trip to Ireland worth? For me? It’s a bit like a credit card commercial.

Priceless.

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