What are outside country people?

I decided I needed to change up the blog a little bit. I never loved the "Gaertner Tales" title and decided to go with something different. In Chinese, the word for a foreigner is literally "outside country people" and that is what we are- people from an outside country. I love living overseas...a lot of the time. There are plenty of days I long to live closer to my family, to live in a place where everyone understands me all the time (well, that is probably impossible wherever you live, but..), to live near a Target that I can easily get to by loading my children into a minivan filled with carseats, etc.

But I am so thankful for the chance to live in such an exciting, influential part of the world, I enjoy learning a new language and the satisfaction that comes with actually being able to speak it, am excited to raise children in a place where they will (hopefully) be bilingual and understand from an early age how to interact with many different kinds of people and see the world from a different perspective. I hope they will learn early on that everyone is not just like us, that while we are so blessed materially many people are not. That being a part of what God is doing in the world is a blessing and an exciting journey. So, that is where our new title comes from. It is often fun, definitely challenging, but overall a great benefit to live as "outside country people".