The Spirituality of Exile

When I went to Amsterdam, I felt abandoned spiritually. I couldn't find God anymore until I realized that God for me had been part of a culture. He was really there, but to an extent, God was so interwoven with the whole social dynamic of the Bible about place and institutions. When you start living in exile, you lose a lot of those certainties perhaps - but what you learn is that God's much greater than you thought. It might be that you first must be brought in a situation of weakness and foolishness like the apostle Paul.