“For here we do not have an enduring city,
but we are looking for the city that is to come.”
-Hebrews 13:14
I have never been home. Understand that statement clearly – I’m not saying I’ve never had a home, I’m saying I have one and have never been there. Sounds like an impossible truth to be able to state, doesn’t it? By my logic you have to have lived somewhere in order for it to be home, and will have therefore been at home at some point in your life. But for the last 8 years, even before I started a real relationship with God, I’ve known that my home is not anywhere I can yet go. I am a temporary visitor to this world, here for a short time. In essence, I’m a short term missionary to the world here for maybe 70 or so years to do God’s work, then it’s back home to the family for the rest of eternity. You can find examples of it all over the bible, but especially in the New Testament we as Christians are referred to as aliens and strangers in this worl, temporary visitors, called to be different and not conform to the ways of this world. We are not creatures of the flesh but of the spirit (‘Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter’) that look to our home in heaven, the city to come. I think it’s put in the plainest form in 1 Peter 2:11 ‘…as aliens and strangers in this world…’
I first heard this at youth when I think I was 15 or so, and it stuck with me. Just that idea that Christians should be as different to the people around them as a foreign traveler is to the local people. Never was it a more prevelant feeling than this last month. We would walk down the road, whether in the middle of nowhere or downtown in the city, and people of all ages would shout from wherever they were standing the one word of English that everyone in the country knows – ‘Hello!’ It would often be followed by one of two things, either a) the person yelling it turning and laughing hysterically with their friends or b) a group of people following us repeating the word enthusiastically and endlessly, no matter how many times you say hello back. There was no getting away from the fact that we were different, and everyone made sure you knew it. This is how a Christian should be in life. Different. In the Khmer language, the biblical use of ‘alien and stranger’ translates to ‘Niek Dor Tayee’, which is closer to ‘outsider’ in english, and is pronounced ‘knee-ek-dor-tay-ee’. Sounds cool, on top of everything else.
So, with all that in mind, tattooing ‘Outsider’ in Khmer on my arm from a guy in a bath towel really was the only logical conclusion I could come to.
