Where do I belong?
Over the last ten years I have lived in five different towns and cities around the country and so when people ask me where I’m from I struggle to give a short answer. It has led to a strange sense of where ‘home’ is for me. I’ve recently met people who have lived in this area for over 50 years and sometimes I wonder what it would be like to have lived in the same place for that amount of time.
As a country, where we belong and how we fit into the international community is being reimagined as our politicians negotiate our exit from the European Union. More urgently there are 65.6 million people globally who have been forcibly displaced and have lost their homes.
So where do I belong? Where do we belong? Where do those who have lost their homes belong?
Paul writes in Ephesians that ‘you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people’ and in Philippians that ‘our citizenship is in heaven.’
So what might that mean for me with my fluid sense of home? What might that mean for you if you have lived in the same place for many years? What about us as a country? What about refugees and asylum seekers?
What difference might it make in our lives if we thought of ourselves and others as citizens of heaven?