bloggedy blog: the personal weblog of a music lover and aging punk wannabe

:: Monday, March 31, 2003 ::

Onward, Christian Sojourners
Several years ago, when I was thinking our church youth ministry -- small, themeless, titleless -- was adrift, I came up with what I thought was a catchy title for the group: the ALIENS. I've since stumbled across or heard of countless other youth groups with the same catchy name. But that's not the point. our ALIENS was actually an acronym, hence the capital letters. It stood for Army of the Living, Indwelling, Eternal, Super-Natural Savior. Clever, eh. I wanted our group to have a biblocentric "theme" of some sort, and the notion that believers are aliens, strangers in a strange land, always struck a chord with me, so I picked 1 Peter 2:11 -- Dear friends, I urge you, as aliens and strangers in the world, to abstain from sinful desires, which war against your soul -- as our touchstone verse. We also created ALIENS T-shirts, an ALIENS banner, and even at one time developed ALIENS tracts to hand out at parades. (Our first year we build a flying saucer for the Christmas parade and played a continuous loop of the intro and chorus of the Newsboys song, "Take Me to Your Leader.")

For whatever reason (probably the T-shirts) the ALIENS theme caught on.

These days, we don't make a big deal of the ALIENS theme. The T-shirts are still popular, but the banner, which saw action in only one parade, now hangs on the wall of our classroom.

I started thinking about this "aliens" theme in Scripture while practicing lectio divina this morning. (Yes, I'm still at it, even after a slothful weekend of watching too much basketball and reading too little Scripture.) Today my eyes fall upon this verse from Psalm 39:

"Hear my prayer, O LORD,
listen to my cry for help;
be not deaf to my weeping.
For I dwell with you as an alien,
a stranger, as all my fathers were.

This served as a powerful reminder to me that I am a stranger in this world -- a stranger to this world, even -- and that I should not get too comfy at the inn. To borrow an idea from the Grateful Dead, it's been a long, strange trip so far. Let's hope it continues to be long and strange. After all, if we are strangers, why shouldn't our journeys be strange?

:: Andrew 08:33 + ::
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