Today on our last free monday before we go home, we hopped on an 8:15 AM train from Marugame station and headed across the Seto In-land sea via the 13 kilometer Seto bridge system to a regionally well known city called Kurashiki.

Kurashiki is actually one of the first cities I visited as a missionary back in 2000, and it seemed like it was always raining when I came then for zone conferences. Today it was rainy again, one of the rainist days we've spent in Japan actually, but we welcomed the cool air and decreased humidity that came with the storm. Last week we had several days of 90 degree plus weather coupled with 80 percent humidity, which means that you can't lift a finger without breaking a sweat. Being soaked from rain is much more pleasant than being drenched with sweat.

I had one of those "muffled background noise, blurry edged frame, slow motion, cheesy music" moments today. We were in a department store in Okayama after spending the day in Kurashiki and I was walking through isles lined with tatami floor mats, dried flower arrangements, low tables, heavily draping kimono fabric, and a hundred kinds of pottery, and it occured to me that we will be leaving all of this in less than two weeks. I am not sad to be going. There isn't an ounce of me that wishes we were staying longer. But at the same time, I am beginning to feel how much I am going to miss the magic that occurs when something so semingly foreign becomes familiar. Walking in that store there was not a single hing I wanted to buy, but at the same time I wanted to take the whole store with me. Part of me inside somewhere is constantly amazed at the fact that my wife and my son and I are living in Japan. Its the part of me that says, "this is a foreign country! We are FOREIGNERS! We're on the other side of the world! This is crazy!" It's the part of me that can't believe how different the food is , how green the wilderness is, how homogeneous the people are, how not american this whole experience is.

Once again, this may sound like it is stating the obvious, but I am convinced there are lessons to be learned about things like diversity and patriotism that cannot be learned without living in another country. I used to wonder why anyone would want to live anywhere else but the United States. But now being here, seeing my own country through the eyes of the world, and feeling for the first time really what it feels like to be in a different social system, and what it feels like to miss the familiar, I realize that my feelings for the United States aren't based on some imagined objective superiority in the world, but rather on it's familiarity. There are people in Canada, in France, in Sout Korea, in every country, city, village in the world who couldn't imagine living anywhere else but home. America is superior for me, and only in as much as it provides me with the familiarity that I have come to expect from the place Icall home. That is all any of us are looking for. Familiarity.