When you live long enough to realize that the world isn’t all about you, then you begin to understand that every person around you has a fascinating story, a story worthy of a slow and attentive hearing, one filled with lessons to learn from if we would only ask.

This realization is particularly stark when you realize that it is true of your parents. Parents are people, with stories (for good and for bad), and not all of their life was taken up with you. They had, and still have - if they are alive - hopes, fears, dreams, insecurities, regrets, secrets, desires, hurts, and all the other things that exist in people’s inner worlds.

As my parents, and my parents in law have gotten older, I have become more and more interested in their lives and stories. This has led to a few really powerful conversations with my mother, where I have learned many things about her and from her. She has lived, and continues to live, a fascinating life, and so, today, on her 75th birthday, I wanted to share some little bits of that story with others.

As I write this, the sun is rising over a cold Texas morning and I cannot help but think of how similar Texas winter days are to Johannesburg winter days. Frosty ground on dormant grass, with big blue skies overhead which seem to reflect the cold rather than offer the warmth that the unhindered access to the sun would usually afford. The day is just beginning here, and I know that it is ending for my friends across the globe. The Lord made the day for me just as He did for them, and He gifts the grace and mercies that we will need to begin this day as He does for those whose day is winding down.

What a big and small world. What grace to call more than one place home.

What a wonderfully confounding thing it is to be a person. We are all a complex mix of image-bearing potential for good and serpent-believing potential for wickedness, and our recognition of this tension ought to make us the most humble and yet most hopeful of all creatures.

Welcome to The Resident Aliens! A place of content creation and collation from a pastor who isn’t from around here.

What we have realized is that to arrive somewhere is simultaneously to leave somewhere else, and in order to be immigrants to somewhere you also have to be emigrants from somewhere else. Our desire therefore hasn’t just been to be good arrivers in a new place, but also to be good leavers of our previous place.