psalm 119:19

19 - I am a stranger 

in the earth:

hide not thy commandments from me.

I only live here, I am not from here.

My heart, my family, my desires, my traditions do not originate from this Cajun swamp in which I reside.  I cook and eat the gumbo and the dirty rice, I have a sixth sense about the weather patterns of this area. I understand the subtle changes that occur in the mentality from one parish to the next parish. (We don't have "counties" here; they are parishes, and I'm cool with that and understand why.) I love the pine trees and the thunderclouds that roll in from the west in the spring and summer.  I love the fact that God only knows how many of my great-aunts and uncles and even a great-grandmother or two lie in the little fenced-in cemetery within the grounds of the nearby military base whose tombstones and grave markers were uprooted by a storm or a backhoe or a careless maintenance worker and whose bones now lie unmarked in the earth over which they walked and breathed and lived out their whole lives.

But I only live here.

This is only the place of my birth, it is not the land of my heart.

If I'm not careful, I can easily become enfolded into the communal traditions of my ancestors and the daring adventuring of the reckless young ones. The unspoken rules of my little world change and sway and bend as they are blown from the larger societies not so far away and the wind is just as strong through the pine trees as it is when it blows through the high rises and the metropolitan society soirees.

I find myself being tied to the Psalmist by a 4000-year-old thread and identifying totally when he says, "I am a stranger in the earth..."

I am, too, David. God never intended for us to feel at home here. He never intended for our hearts to be at rest and our psyche to be at peace here. We are citizens of another world.

And we must live by the commandments of another world.

God convict us for not searching out Your commands.

Forgive us for living life by the guidelines of our culture that is at enmity with You.

I can faintly hear my grandmother singing in her high, reedy voice...

"This world is not my home, I'm just a-passin through
My treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue
The angels beckon me from heaven's open door
And I can't feel at home in this world any more..."

© 2012 by Melani Brady Shock