When our new booklet "Does God Exist?" was delivered yesterday it wasn’t the first time I was asked where I am from.

Since my first visit to Germany in 1971 I have progressed from being recognized as an American to sometimes being mistaken for being Dutch or English. The delivery man asked me if I were English or American, and I told him that he had promoted me by thinking I was English.

I then told him I was from St. Louis, Missouri in the USA. "What are you doing over here?" was his surprised response. When I told him how long I had lived in Germany, his response was: "I would have just stayed over there. I’m kind of an America-freak." That was also what another delivery man told me about five years ago when he and I unloaded the "Gute Nachrichten" magazine. I was wearing my "Route 66" hat (which I now only wear in the USA).

When I accompanied Jerry Aust to Berlin in 2005, we had a beer in a pub at the Berlin-Spandau station while waiting for our train back to Bonn. The waiter was from the former Yugoslavia and had lived in Germany for some 20 years. When he heard that we were from America and that I lived in Germany, he said that his goal had been to get to America, but he wound up in Germany instead.

"What are doing here?" – proof that America still fascinates people as a land of opportunity.