I’ve been an alien in this place, but I finally see my way home

I have been a stranger in this place all my life.

An alien. Just a visitor.

I was born among a people who I didn’t understand. A society that felt alien. A culture that felt cruel and perverted.

All my life, I have struggled between two competing compulsions. Part of me felt as though I had to fit in here. I felt that I had to conform. I had to become acceptable to the people around me — the ones who were so quick to judge me and ridicule me when I didn’t imitate them.

The other part of me has always been searching for a home that I knew was somewhere else. That part of me knew that I was an alien among these people. That part knew that I was looking for something. A person? A place? A force? I didn’t know.

The more I understood that I was a stranger in this land, the more I vaguely conceived that I was looking for another place. Not a physical place that’s on a map. I was looking for the place where I would find this “something” that I was compelled to find.

I’ve been traveling for a long time, metaphorically speaking. I’ve had to leave behind everything that was familiar to me when I started. I didn’t have a map. I just had the vaguest understanding that it was a land far away — and that it was shrouded in fog or clouds or mystery.

I’ve circled this place over and over. I’ve come close and then lost it. I’ve gotten scared — at times — and run back to the familiar world and culture where I started. Each time that’s happened, I was back at the starting point, but I had a slightly more clear vision of where I needed to go.

I discovered that finding this fabled destination wasn’t just about a map. It wasn’t the same as walking to a physical place. In all my stumbling and bumbling efforts to find this home, I finally had to accept that getting to this place required me to completely change who I was.

It slowly became evident that I couldn’t find this place without the renewing of my mind and my heart. And the more I worked toward that inward change, the less I was welcome in the outward world where I lived. The less I was like the people of the culture in which I’d grown up.

I was afraid, though, because it seemed to require me to give up what I knew before having a real understanding of where I was going.

After all these years, I am a weary traveler who sees this place in the clouds. I can’t see it clearly yet, but I know it’s there.

It feels as though I’m finally at a place where there is a footbridge from the land I’ve known to this place I’ve been seeking. This place that feels like my home.

But I’ve been carrying baggage all this way, thinking I can bring it with me to my home. And now I realize I have to cross this footbridge that’s sturdy enough to carry me all by myself, but it’s not strong enough to support the baggage I’ve carried for a lifetime.

I have to give up the things I’ve carried from the world behind me. If I want to cross that footbridge, I have to walk across with nothing other than my own mind, my own heart and my own soul.

Even though this is the place I’ve been seeking, I’m afraid to give up what I’ve brought with me, because I don’t know how to live without them.

The only currency of the place on the other side is love.

If I want to live in that place, I have to give up things that have served me for decades. Pride. Bitterness. Resentment. Anger. Hatred. Selfishness. Ego.

I’m afraid to fully let those things go, because I’ve nursed them — in the privacy of my heart — as the things that allowed me to survive the alien world where I lived.

I’ve discovered love, but I understand it in only the most rudimentary way. I’ve talked about love all my life. I’ve heard it discussed and preached over and over, but it’s been a pale imitation of the real thing.

If I set down all of the baggage I’ve brought with me, I will have nothing that the world behind me would truly value.

I have learned much about love, but do I have enough to be welcomed in this place where I am going? I feel like such an infant in my learning and my experience of love. Can I truly give up all of my old ways — enough to live in a place where only love matters?

And this is where I stand. I know enough of the love to feel some of it. To experience awakenings of that love in my heart. To know that the burning flames of that love are more powerful than anything back in the world from which I come.

I am afraid to fully commit to love.

I am afraid to give up all of my baggage.

But I stand at this footbridge knowing that this is what I’ve been looking for all my life. And I know I have no choice. I have to allow my mind and heart and spirit to be completely transformed.

I’m a child. A baby. A stranger. An alien.

I know I’ve come too far to go back. I must learn to trust completely in love. And that requires me to drop the baggage — to close my eyes and step out in faith that love will carry me home.

Note: As I wrote this, I kept hearing a song that I haven’t heard for many years. When I was much younger, an artist named Brown Bannister — who was mostly known as a producer for other Christian artists — had a hauntingly beautiful song that seems to capture some of what I’m feeling as I write this. It’s a cover of a song by English artist Leslie Duncan.