The Bible calls us strangers and pilgrims in this world. For most Christians, this is a metaphor. For me, it has also been quite literal.

I am German, living in Florida. I speak English with an accent that people cannot always place. I belong to a church that most of my friends back home find incomprehensible, and I hold convictions that most of my neighbors here find curious. I am a stranger in multiple senses of the word — geographically, culturally, spiritually.

I have learned to stop treating this as a problem.

The Pilgrim Identity

The Apostle Peter wrote to the early Christians as "elect exiles" — people dispersed across the world, living as strangers among the nations (1 Peter 1:1). He did not write this apologetically, as though being an exile were a condition to be remedied. He wrote it as a statement of identity. This is who you are. This is your situation. Now live accordingly.

What does it mean to live as a stranger? It means your primary citizenship is elsewhere. It means you are not ultimately invested in the approval of the culture around you, because that culture is not your home. It means you can speak plainly — about truth, about sin, about salvation — because you are not running for office in this country. You are passing through it.

This is enormously liberating, once you accept it. The fear of being rejected, the fear of being called strange or offensive or extreme — these fears have power only if you need to belong. If you have already accepted that you do not fully belong here, they lose much of their force.

What Strangeness Gives You

Being a stranger gives you a clarity that belonging can obscure. When you are inside a culture, it is very hard to see it. Its assumptions feel like reality. Its values feel like inevitabilities. Only when you stand slightly outside it — as I do, as a foreigner — can you see the things that the insiders cannot see: the idols that are worshipped without being named, the questions that are not allowed to be asked, the truths that are too uncomfortable to speak aloud.

The prophet Jeremiah was a stranger in his own people. He saw what they could not see, or would not see: that the path they were on led to destruction. He spoke, and they hated him for it. He did not stop speaking. That is the calling of the stranger: not to make peace with the blindness of the crowd, but to keep saying what you see, regardless of the cost.

I am still learning what it means to live this way. But I am grateful for every dimension of my strangeness — geographical, cultural, spiritual — because each one of them has taught me to hold more lightly to the things of this world, and more firmly to the things of the next.

"But our citizenship is in heaven." (Philippians 3:20)

— Heike Boecken, December 2011