I'm An Alien

Do you ever forget who you are? I know that I do...often. At least more often than I would like too. Now, I'm not saying that I forget who I am in this world. My name is Justin and all that jazz, I'm not losing my memory, at least in the physical sense. Sometimes I think I forget who I am in the spiritual sense though.

Tonight has been a long night. It's 3:21a.m. on the West Coast right now and I've been up all night. For much of the night I've been thinking about how much I want to go home and I don't mean back to MN, which is where I am originally from. I want to go home to my Father, to my Savior; to my King.

I went went to the Ministry Training Institute following my two years at AFLBS. I studied cross cultural missions and spent three months of my second semester in Mexico. While there I learned many things, but often during the night I would long to go home. I felt out of place. I didn't fit in. I didn't know the language, the customs, or the people. I longed for home and the familiarity of the things and people that I knew. Now, a missionary has the opportunity, and rightly so, to become familiar with the language, customs, and people, of another country, in the spiritual sense though I don't want that. As a believer I don't want to become familiar, as I once was with the customs, language, and ways of this world. To know what they are and acknowledge that they exist is important, but I don't want them to become a part my life. All too often I am afraid that they are and I have much to learn about the ways of God and the things that are important to Him and how to walk as a believer in this world, but those are the things that I long for and ultimately I long to go home.

Ephesians 2:19 says, "So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God." Now, the context there is about the Gentiles becoming partakers of what God had given to the Jewish people first, but the fact remains that we have been allowed into the family of God and citizens of his Kingdom and members of his household. How cool is that!

I never want to forget that but I often do. I wish things weren't what they are here, but reality says differently. Things are not as good as they will one day be for those who believe and I wish that many more would come to the knowledge of the truth.

I wept tonight. I want to go home. I don't feel at home. May it never again be that I do. May it never be that any of us do. We are not of this world. May we learn to walk as citizens of the Kingdom and Family that we now belong to.