It was $18 I didn't need to spend, but I couldn't resist the colours --iridescent gold, tawny copper, magenta and olive green, flowing like an exotic rainbow through the Somali woman's thin grey-brown hands. At that price it was almost certainly polyester, not silk, and I was probably getting ripped off. But I bought it anyway. Maybe the same corner of me that still steps over cracks in the sidewalk hoped that, by some magic, it might lend me some of the woman's slender elegance. Didn't work, of course.

Just as the southeast Asians and the Italians before them have flowed through the city's poorer districts, vastly improving the local restaurant scene, so the East African immigrants are adding to the visual landscape. The women, like the one who was selling scarves and shawls, are gravely graceful in their elegantly wrapped headscarves and long dresses, fine-boned and long-limbed and large-eyed, many of them as beautiful as anything on a magazine cover. But the men are handsome too, and the children are simply stunning.

Of course there are will be some problems. Some of these people will fit in and prosper; others will go wrong or fail. The city isn't totally tolerant of different racial and religious groups --is any city? There are potential areas of irritation: to this Muslim woman, seeing my bare head, arms and legs may be as jarring as it would be for me to live in a culture where women went bare-breasted. When I looked her in the face and smiled, was I being friendly and comforting or was I intruding on her personal space and being aggressive? I don't know. We must strain their patience considerably sometimes. And sometimes they may strain ours.

It must be hard to watch your children turn away from the values that your parents inculcated you in, and begin to shift into the dominant culture. It must be hard to have trouble finding the stuff you need to cook with (although I notice some city supermarkets now carry mutton and kid). It's must be hard to struggle with the language, the transit system, the seasons--my God, what must it be like to live with the winters here, if you're used to a subtropical climate?

Of course there are also major advantages. If you've spent years in a country in chaos and civil war, then whatever the climate, the sheer blessed peace and security of Canada must be something to be deeply, daily grateful for. This country is at the top of the list of good places to live, and with reason. But still, this woman is an exile, and to be an exile is not easy.

We too are exiles if we think about it. There is a Kingdom of God, we believe, and it has not yet come to pass on this earth. If there is a life to come, we aren't there yet. This world is not always as we want it; sometimes its values are not our values and often its selfish, uncaring, violent, greedy ways can hurt our hearts. It isn't always easy. But for many, maybe for most people, life is exile of one sort or another. How many people do feel at ease in their lives, comfortable and happy? Some, but I don't know too many.

Maybe that's why the Babylonian Captivity is such a feature of the Old Testament: to tell us that we aren't alone in feeling we don't belong here, even if there may be real advantages to being where we are, real and solid joys in our lives. The prophet, sending comfortable words to his people, told them to make the best of it: "Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage. ... Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare, you will find your welfare. ... For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope."

Maybe that's what we have to give this woman, hard as her life may be right now: a future with hope. Maybe already her kids are playing road hockey or watching Barney or collecting Star Wars action figures. I hope so; I hope she and they will bloom in our colder soil, while bringing to our culture some of the richness of their own. It's likely she has found the comfort of other women like her, and maybe together they can have a safe place to put one foot while the other ventures into this strange new world, so safe and bright and prosperous, but so little like home.

Maybe that's how we have to live our lives, even as we long for the Kingdom: to put down roots and grow where we are, taking pleasure in whatever good the day brings, blessing the world we live in while knowing it isn't the world we want. Maybe if we can do that, we really can seek its welfare without trying to force it to be what it cannot be--like learning to love the Canadian winter instead of trying to make it warm. Maybe that way we can give this world our gifts lovingly, instead of trying to shove them down its throat, helping it to change by example instead of trying to pound it into shape by brute force, to our own inevitable defeat.

Maybe that way we can live our lives peaceably and with a measure of contentment, without forgetting what home looks and feels like. Exiles, perhaps, but living in trust that Home will be there when our seventy years are accomplished: living both to love this day and to hope for the future.

Jer. 29:4-14.