Life returns...to normal!

So, today, we delivered our Serbian high school exchange student to the airport so that he could return to his native country of Montenegro.  We took our student from Kazakhstan to the airport a couple of weeks ago.  They have lived with us since last August while attending high school for a year here.  Our house is back to our form of normal.  Now, if you are a person who doesn’t know where those countries are, then perhaps you should get an exchange student from there yourself……..we didn’t know where they were either! 

For those of you who like to pray, you may want to pray for the two of them.  I have been told that all these months with my sense of humor is bound to have left them scarred for life!  Need an illustration?  Well, it isn’t a big one, but when I learned how small a country Montenegro is, and that it is the result of multiple splits over many years of what once had been Yugoslavia, I told our student to make sure he let me know whether he ended up in Monte or Negro if the country splits again!  The boys became like family, because, just like everybody else in my family, my puns and plays on words met with the same roll of the eyes and “ha, ha, ha, very funny” that everybody else in the family has been giving me for years!

 They came to our home in a total surprise…..it was a very sudden and last minute opportunity.  And it turned out to be quite a year.  Voices….. sometimes very LOUD voices….skyping at all hours of the day or night.  A Muslim student sharing a room with a Serbian Orthodox student in the home of a Baptist minister.  Lots of very interesting conversations! 

What does this have to do with divorce, or with the book?  Nothing really.  Except maybe to share the comment we received from the boys when they left, how they so appreciated feeling so much a part of our family.  In other words, now some 12 years out of divorce, life has gone on, my family has permutated in many ways, and yet has become the kind of family that total strangers like those boys found to be a good home to be in.  Divorce is NOT the end of the story.  In lots and lots of ways, and some of those ways can be pretty good.