A place where no one is an expat

View from a pew

By Sue Robbins

In Panama, you hear the word “ex-patriot” a lot.  It comes from the Latin ex patria – ex meaning “out of” and patria meaning “one’s country.”  As our world gets smaller, more folks are finding themselves ex patria, literally, “strangers in a strange land.”

It is a new normal for humanity; and when it happens to us, we go looking for groups and places in our new countries where we can find friends and feel safe and where we can belong.  It’s about blooming where we’re planted and building something in a place we never expected to be. 

Expats “happen” in a thousand ways:  a fork in the professional road deliberately chosen; a serendipitous chance event…causing a slight change…creating a chain reaction; or perhaps an error in judgment, a mistake, and suddenly you’re out on your ear and looking for a new place to start over. 

Our suggested Bible readings this Lenten season have included the story of Adam and Eve, two people who made a mistake and suddenly found themselves strangers in a strange land.  We noted from the pulpit last Sunday that if this had been a Greek tragedy, Adam and Eve would have been the final act:

“You had it all.  You messed up.  Too bad for you.  The end.”

Instead, in the Judeo-Christian Bible, it’s the very, very beginning of the story, pointing to the central message of the Bible and the Christian Church:  We are not alone.  We may make weird choices, we may make really dumb mistakes, we may wander far off the beaten track, but God goes with us, no matter what.  We are not alone.

Statistics show that eighty percent of people who walk through the doors of a church do so because they are experiencing some kind of life-changing trauma:  new home, new city, new baby, just divorced, a bad medical diagnosis, death in the family.  They are strangers wandering through strange lands, searching for a safe place and gravitating to the doors of the church in the hopes of finding sanctuary and a sense of belonging.

It is the mission of the Christian church to welcome strangers, to feed the hungry, to care for the sick, to clothe the naked.  We say, “Come to us, all you who are heavy-ladened.  There are no ex-patriots here; we are in this together.  You are not alone.”