Well, if I’m going to keep going with this blog (and I think I am) I thought I might as well take this opportunity to explain why I chose the title a stranger and a sojourner, since it’s a little vague, and probably more than a little bit pretentious to use such an antiquated word. Oh, well. I hate titling things, and I was so annoyed when trying to come up with a title for this blog that I almost gave up on the whole idea. But there is a reason behind the title I finally chose, and this is it.
Lately I’ve been struggling with a feeling of homelessness. Not in the sense that I don’t have a place to live, but in the sense that I don’t have a real home anymore. My parents moved out of my childhood home while I was still in college and, on top of the fact that I haven’t lived any one place longer than three months for the past four years, it has made me feel unsettled. In the midst of seemingly constant transitions, I crave the comfort and security of a physical place I can call my home.
One day after my parents moved I was trying to express these feelings to my dad, and he reminded me that we are strangers and sojourners in this world and that as Christians we aren’t meant to belong here. Our citizenship is in heaven, not on Earth. At the time, I was a little irritated because I was just looking for someone to listen to me and appreciate what I was going through. I thought it was a perfectly natural human desire to want to belong somewhere, and to mourn the loss of a place that held so much significance and memory for me.
But in the year or so since then I’ve often been reminded of that conversation, and I’ve come to see the wisdom of my dad’s words. Of course the concept of seeing heaven as our home is not a new one, but when he put it in the context of letting go of my desire to belong somewhere, it took on a new meaning for me. In a way, this feeling of transience is not a feeling I should be fighting or resisting. I should always feel a little unsettled in this world. I’m a stranger and a sojourner, travelling far from my home.
The phrase strangers and sojourners comes from the King James Version of the Bible, and it’s used often to describe the people of God. From the Israelites living in Egypt to the New Testament believers looking toward their heavenly home, God’s people lived as strangers and sojourners on Earth. They were strangers among the people they lived with, but they had faith and hope in the home that God had prepared for them.
In contemporary versions, this description is usually translated aliens and strangers or foreigners and strangers. But I chose a stranger and a sojourner because I thought it sounded cooler and more unique for a blog title. And more seriously, I think the word sojourner has a fuller connotation than alien or foreigner. The word means a short-term traveler, someone visiting temporarily. When applied to Christians, it expresses the fact that not only is Earth not our home, but our time travelling here is short.
So from now on I want to view myself as a sojourner. I don’t want to let myself build an identity through my earthly life or try to find comfort and security here, because this isn’t where I belong. And knowing that my time on Earth is brief, I only want to focus on those goals that will have meaning when I go home. I want to keep my ties to material things and physical places loose, so that I’m always ready to go wherever God wants me. And I want to wait expectantly for the day when my sojourn on Earth will come to an end. Come quickly, Lord Jesus!
