It’s A Lie
I couldn’t sleep. At 1:30a, I crawled out of bed and headed downstairs. My interior world was full of angst. I grabbed my journal and began to write. A page into writing, these words came to mind that I penned in capital letters: I am on my own! That describes the lie that too often guides my life. I felt overwhelmed by the discovery of those words.
Let me jump ahead in my story. A day after that sleepless night, I was flying to a conference only my flight was canceled as I arrived at the airport at 6:20a for an 8:15 flight.. A second text arrived announcing I had been rescheduled for a 7:05 flight. I was incredulous. How do they expect me to make it to another flight when I am not even at the airport yet? Riding a shuttle from the parking lot with only 40 minutes to spare, I was panicked. When I finally arrived at the airport with a backpack and small suitcase, I began to run toward the assigned gate. Sweating profusely, I angrily thought to myself, “Here is proof of what I so often feel and believe: I AM ON MY OWN! No one cares. No one cares that my day is now screwed up. No one cares that all the carefully planned transportation details involving others is now in disarray.”
Back to that sleepless night. As I wrote in my journal, my mind drifted to Psalm 73 where the author describes himself as a brute beast (v22). I felt something similar. But immediately after describing himself in that manner, we read these words: You take me by my right hand and guide me with your counsel. Asaph, the psalmist, was not alone though his felt perception might have argued otherwise. And I, angrily running through the airport, was also not alone. In the midst of my sprint for the gate, I stopped. I remembered the words of Psalm 73:23—You take me by the right hand… Suddenly, a peace settled into my heart. I am not on my own. No matter what this day held—and it would hold an 8-hour wait in the Baltimore airport—God was with me.
As I processed with my wife this I am on my own belief, it morphed into an understanding of always feeling on the outside, whether not included in some way or simply not wanted (“undesirable” is the word for me). Ever felt this way? Of course you have. We all feel this, whether an actual experience or a sense we carry around with us. As a pastor, I once confessed publicly this sense of being on the outside. A woman who had been a part of the church recently revealed to me how puzzled she was by that revelation years ago. How could I as the pastor say such a thing since to her it seemed like I was at the center of so much? But this sense of being on the outside is a reality of living in a fallen world. We live exiled…or on the outside. Adam and Eve got the ball rolling, and ever since we all live outside of where it is and for Whom it is we were created. We try not to feel it by grasping at people and places to feel “in”, often at the expense of others. I would suggest an alternative option: embrace it. Let it incite your thirst (hope) for a better day. Let it lead you to God. Then speak truth into this “ache.” We are not on the outside even though we feel it, sometimes acutely. But God says we are in, in his family, in as sons and daughters. And we wait for the day when we will no longer feel the pain of being exiled or on the outside. That day is coming.
Let’s allow CS Lewis to have the final word: We walk every day on the razor edge between these two incredible possibilities (being on the outside and being invited in). Apparently, then, our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside, is no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation. And to be at last summoned inside would be both glory and honor beyond all our merits and also the healing of that old ache. The door upon which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last.