This is Rome, and this is home

Maybe it was foolish to go alone for a week to a country where the only words of the Italian language I knew were "ciao," from watching too many bad chick flicks when I was younger, and all-important English cognates like "pizza." Maybe it was naive of me to think everyone in Italy would speak English and all would go smoothly.

Either way, I went. Either way, God gave me so many gifts through the many challenges.

All I had to do was ask God for something, and it was provided: When I had no clue where to get off the bus, an Italian English-speaking couple asked me if I knew where I was going. Turns out we were getting off at the same stop, and they showed me where to go. When I needed directions, there was a policeman or English speaker to ask. When I was about to cry and leave the train station after waiting for my friend for an hour without being able to contact her, not knowing how to get where I needed, and no one willing to help me, I turned around and there she was. And on and on.

Along with God's provision, it was the people -- vessels of his faithfulness -- who made an impression on me: the Sisters of the Eucharist who ran the guesthouse where I stayed, who didn't speak one word of English, yet nursed and fed me on the day I was too sick to get out of bed, loving me as if I was Christ. Whose lives are made up of a series of interruptions as they run to unlock the door each time a guest staying at the house rings to get in, some of the most beautiful examples of holiness I have witnessed.

Tara, a woman a few years older than I, and her mom, Joan, with whom I waited in line for Mass at St. Peter's Basilica. Joan's face as we walked up the aisle to the main altar after the two-hour wait: written there gratitude at this gift and a lifetime of deep faith welling up in her eyes. "All I had to do to get this trip right was get her to Mass at St. Peter's," Tara had said.

The photographer I met at the flea market: "This, this is a place in Rome," he said, pointing to a quite astounding black-and-white image of part of the Colosseum. "It is not Rome." He shuffled through his framed photos, drawing out the one he was looking for and holding it in front of me: an image of scaffolding in front of windows, taken through the slats of another window, the rectangles a color somewhere between blue and teal, evidence of a camera used so skillfully and an eye quietly intimate with the city. "This," he said, "This is Rome."

Me, turning a corner from the Vatican Museums and unknowingly stepping into St. Peter's Basilica for the first time, after a day of loneliness and a snarky attitude. Inside, the realization and then the tears in my own eyes. Home.