This episode is one of a series of conversations that have to do with living all of life within the bigger story of the Gospel. We're calling this big Gospel story the “Beyond Me Story.” This story sits in contrast to the “Me Story," the one handed to us at birth within which we all live.
One of the innate longings all people experience has to do with place. Most people want a place to belong, a place to feel at ease, or a place to call our own. We call this place home. Something about home feels right, or safe. The Me Story would have us believe that we can find a place in our own journey of self-discovery and self-fulfillment that will provide an essential piece the puzzle that is "me."
The Beyond Me Story reveals to us a different reality. The notion of place, or home, is central to the Beyond Me Story. So, too, is the reality of exile, a separation from the fullness of God's presence that we experience as an unfulfilled longing for home. The central character of the Beyond Me Story, Jesus, displaced himself from his home in order to dwell with us, in our state of exile, to show us the way home. The reality of a home found in and through Jesus has both a temporal and an eternal dimension. Jesus' earliest followers called themselves "sojourners" or "wanderers," terms that captured the temporal nature of an earthly human experience. Yet even as they sojourned, they reflected the greater reality of the kingdom by building up the people and places around them. In this way they, and we, find home.
