Can it already have been two weeks that we’ve been in Berlin?

Can it really have been only two weeks so far?

In retrospect, we divide up our lives more neatly than they ever happened: a few years down the road, Lord willing, we’ll think of our time in Berlin as having begun on August 14th, 2014, and that will be that. The frantic preparations of the five weeks prior to that date that followed the booking of our tickets will seem less real than the date (August 13th) that they ended, and these weeks will be hard to remember in much detail.

But there’s a lot of detail. Some things we’ll always remember and talk about – how we spent our first few days in a blitz of apartment viewings, after which we were granted a contract on the very first apartment we’d seen and moved in just a week after arrival. Some things, I expect, will fade: the quaint little burner phone we are using until we get individual smartphones; cooking meals with a few borrowed pots and pans and eating them off of Ikea children’s dishes; trying to keep Peter entertained in the Schloss Mall next door to Steglitz City Hall while we waited to register our new address; the racket our borrowed air mattresses make when we shift in our sleep; waiting for a debit card to arrive from the bank so we can go on our big furniture-buying spree; racing toy cars across the empty living room with Peter.

We are speaking German again, quite a bit, and it’s coming back well enough, but you never really remember how tiring it is to speak your second language, even if just for a few hours out of the day. A few online errands to sign us up for this or that service, a short prayer meeting at church, a quick chat with a friendly neighbor who’s picking up a package the Amazon delivery guy left for him with you, and you feel like you’ve just taken an all-day exam – your brain just shuts down. It gets easier with “exercise,” but you’re always working a little harder mentally than you ever have to back in the States.

All the same, these things are gifts, each one of them. We are in a beautiful, green part of the city, a place we have found wonderfully friendly so far. Our apartment is delightful, with big windows and an airy layout that will help us to all the sun we can get in the dark months to come; aside from all sorts of lovely little conveniences (lots of built-in or pre-installed storage is not to be sniffed at here), it’s across the street from a bakery, a block off of the canal with its walking paths and playgrounds, and most importantly, around the corner from our church on one side and our teammates’ home on the other.

I tend to be rather like Puddleglum in mentality, especially in the face of a wealth of blessing like this: when’s the other shoe going to drop? Ten to one the new washing machine leaks or our visa application is rejected or the Calormenes invade, something like that. It’s easy to put a pious face on that thinking – doesn’t God grow us through suffering? Then surely we can’t be growing very much right now. Surely some major inconvenience needs to come along to set the balance right!

But I am trying to keep in mind what Jesus had to say about good gifts and what they’re for, trying to see these things as minas given for us to invest here in the neighborhood He is entrusting, in some measure, to us. Perhaps so far the Lord has found us faithful with a little, and is now giving a little more, in the expectation of reaping a greater return. It’s a humbling, daunting thought, but a joyful one: how might we make the living space God has given us into a home not only for us but for the neighbors we don’t know yet? If so much good to us is just the initial investment, the first mina, what will it be to see that make ten minas more?

It’s good to be here.

-Ben