Seven days.

That's one week or, roughly, the amount of time I've been back in my home country.

Coming back to Australia after several years overseas isn't exactly what I imagined it to be. My experiences have changed who I am in a fundamental way. I'm not who I used to be. But also the people I love have changed too. My memories are frozen in time but their lives have continued to move on.

I find myself missing things I had begun to take for granted.

I miss the crazy traffic that makes Beirut a jumble of noise and color. I miss being woken early in the morning by the Muslim call to prayer from a nearby mosque. I still miss the materialistic ease of life in America and I find myself trying to ascend escalators on the wrong side (yes, in America the up side is opposite to Australia!).

As much as I miss all these things, the truth is that eventually this sense of transition will fade. I will become used to Australia again and cease to immediately compare differences.

What is truly important is that who I am continues to grow and develop in a positive way. Christian character is universal and the significance of placing God as a first priority never fades with time, purpose or circumstance. The God who challenged me to grow closer to him in America, and continued to encourage me in Lebanon is the same God who is with me now. God loves me here with as much passion and commitment as he has loved me anywhere else.

"Love never fails. " (1 Corinthians 13:8)

I've had reason in the past months to think about love from a biblical perspective in a way I haven't before. I'm a reductionist and I guess I have wanted an easy answer. I also have a logical bent with a general distrust for the fuzzy emotional world. The question I have been pondering is a simple, but broad one: what does sanctified love look like and how can I recognise and cultivate it?

I used to believe that relational happiness was largely due to compromise: compromise enough and anything can work, right?

Except that somehow in the compromise I lost myself and happiness was more elusive than ever.

I've learned the hard way that mutual love cannot exist where one or two people have no clue who they really are. You cannot give when you are empty. You cannot be vulnerable when you are hidden even from yourself. As scripture says aptly: we love because he first loved us. We cannot love until we have experienced love and discovered the self that God intended us to be.

I'm grateful as I type out words in jet-lagged induced wakefulness.

I'm grateful because out of earlier struggles and pain, I found my identity in Christ and I know who I am. Because I know who I am, I can submit my weaknesses and temptations to God and experience transformation. I can give up my selfishness while retaining my boundaries. I can offer acceptance and cease to take things personally.

I was tracing my way through 1 Corinthians 13 sometime back when a thought struck me: we need the self-respect to treat ourselves with that kind of love before we are able to extend it to those around us.

Love your neighbour as yourself.

Not as a superior before whom you grovel and hope to find acceptance and personal affirmation.

Not as an inferior to be crushed and mistreated.

Your relation to others, and your treatment of them, comes from your sense of self. And your sense of self, ultimately, comes from your relation to God.

As one of my favourite authors wrote: "It is not pleasing to God that you should demerit yourself. You should cultivate self-respect.... While we should not think of ourselves more highly than we ought, the Word of God does not condemn a proper self-respect. As sons and daughters of God, we should have a conscious dignity of character, in which pride and self-importance have no part." - The Review and Herald, March 27, 1888