To Feel Two Things at Once

Well, we only have about a month left here in Jerusalem and as the days pass by I become more and more conflicted about the whole thing.  We are very much looking forward to seeing our families and driving to the store to get exactly what we need when we need it...but I am sad about many things I will leave here.  

I'm sad about the friendships, I mean REAL, lasting friendships that will be made harder by living across the world.  I told Max the other night "I feel like I'm finally learning how to really invest in people!"  It sounds like perhaps I am a sociopath when I write it down like that, but I have never been good at getting close to people and creating lasting friendships outside of a few.  I feel like this small community of members of our church and fellow students we have made friends with in the student village have really become our family.  It has felt much easier for me to form strong relationships very quickly.  Helping and being helped in a place and time where everyone needs a lot of it has really hastened the process.  For whatever reason it is has been harder for me to help others and certainly much harder to accept help back home in America.  

On the topic of things that are different back home - I have really enjoyed the slower pace of life here.  It takes me three times as long to do laundry and go grocery shopping, twice as long to cook dinner, and many times longer to do all of the regular things I did back home.  At first it annoyed me, but I have come to really enjoy the slower pace of life here.  I spend more time cooking food and so less time is wasted pointlessly surfing the internet (but to be sure, I still do that...).  There is something more deliberate in my day to day activities here that I hope I can maintain when I go home.  There are many good habits I have developed that I hope stick around once we reach the US of A.  

Any thoughts on transitional times?    

But we are eagerly awaiting bacon bleu cheeseburgers as well as visiting with our family and friends.  Home is home.  So we'll see the last four museums on our list  (Yad Vashem, The Bible Lands Museum, The Rockefeller Musuem, and The Islamic Museum of Art) and call it a year.  Well, almost a year.  Both of us feel like we'll be back to Jerusalem in the years to come and it's nice to know it's not goodbye forever.  

...and it's not even goodbye for another month anyway!  Get ahold of yourself Stoneman.