Here's another idiom I've been thinking about lately is “Absence makes the heart grow fonder.” I agree with this one to some degree. Here in Korea, I've found myself appreciating a lot of things about St. Louis that I've begun to take for granted in my daily life. I don't think that I am any fonder of those things now than I was before, but I do think that I'm noticing them a little more.

I feel like absence is like looking through a light microscope. When I took my biology lab this summer, when we wanted to look at cells and bacteria through the microscope, we had to first put it on a setting that magnified things at 40 times. Only after achieving perfect focus from the distant setting could you focus at the closer settings up to 1000 times their size. You see where I'm going with this right? Just as when I look at things through a microscope, the higher settings (i.e, being closer to home) shows things more accurately, but to get to the point where you can properly see those things, you have to look through a low setting first.

So what do I notice that I'm fond of a home? I notice the diversity of St. Louis. Even though Seoul has a lot of foreigners in the city, it's absolutely nothing compared to St. Louis, which represents nationalities from every area of the globe. I notice how my family loves to talk about anything; when I call home even to talk for a few minutes, the discussions last at least twenty minutes and range from Korean dramas to reformation theology. When I talk to people about life in the U.S, I'll tell memories of mine that I forgot I had, or impressions that I've always had, but never had to articulate.

Being in a different city makes me see myself through a different lens of the microscope as well. Even in Korea, I still do all the same things I did in St. Louis, but now that I'm far away, I notice everything more clearly. Even though I do all the same things, for the first time I notice myself running down hills laughing and breathless, waving at every baby on the train, befriending janitors and security guards and singing o so loudly in Swahili.