Resident Aliens

Carson Palmer has recently requested to be traded from the Cincinnati Bengals. He has expressed his distaste for the Bengals organization to the point that he said he is willing to retire before he puts on a Bengals jersey or steps foot into Paul Brown stadium again. He hates it there!

This is not the first time Palmer has expressed his disgust for Cincinnati or the entire state of Ohio. In fact, a few years ago when Ohio State played Southern California, Palmer bashed not just Ohio State fans, but Ohio in general.

As an Ohio native, this drives me crazy. I want the Bengals owner to force him into retirement and never let him play football another day of his life. I want other bad things to happen to him as well. I want him to be walking into a restaurant in Cincinnati and the manager refuses to serve him. I want people to refuse to buy his mansion so that he is forced to live there, or at least own that property for the rest of his life. In my heart, I dislike Carson Palmer VERY much.

However, recently, this dislike of Carson Palmer (and his mutual dislike of me) has stirred up other thoughts and emotions within me. I have begun to wonder why it is that I feel so strongly about where I’m from. Why am I so passionate about Ohio, and specifically Ohio State? I’ve lived in other places and I like living in other places. I am currently living in South Carolina and I love that. In fact, the only time I don’t love living here is when I meet people who were born and raised here and have to listen to them talk about “The South” as if it were God’s gift to the world. But seriously, why do I take offense when people bash Ohio? Am I that egotistical?

This random wondering of mine has led to another question that I think is more significant. Will I like heaven even though it is not Ohio? In heaven, will I feel like it is my home or will I feel homesick for Ohio the way I get homesick for Ohio now every once in a while?

I hear people down here all the time who say, “I could never leave the South.” Really? Do you understand that heaven is not going to be the South? Do you understand that heaven will be made up of people who are from all parts of the world? Do you understand that Jesus himself was not southern?

I hear other people talk about America as if it is God’s gift to the world. We pledge allegiance to America as if it is OUR HOME! We sing songs about America as if this plot of land were something special. We try to keep immigrants out of this land because we feel like they aren’t good enough to exist here (even though most of us come from families who used to be immigrants). We take pride in the fact that lots of people from other countries want to come here!

We sing an old song in our churches every once in a while. It goes like this:

“Oh Lord, you know I have no friend like you.

If heaven’s not my home then Lord what will I do?

The angels beckoned me from heaven’s open door

And I can’t feel at home in the world anymore!”

Do we really mean that? Do we really feel a loyalty to heaven more so than we do to the place that we grew up or the country that we live in? Do we feel completely homesick for heaven? Do we feel helpless at the thought of having to make our home somewhere else?

I don’t. I can’t sing that song honestly right now. I have too much pride built up in where I was born and raised. I despise people like Carson Palmer for trash-talking my home state. It makes me want to take cheap-shots at his home state of California. I get genuinely offended at southerners who talk about the South as if is so much greater than the North. And they get even more offended when I even hint at making fun of their home.

This needs to change. If we are Christians, we are aliens in this world and we should act that way. We should sing songs like the one above and we should stop singing songs about a place that we don’t even belong to and shouldn’t be able to relate to.

I want to be homesick for heaven. I want to understand what it means to be “in this world but not of this world.” I want to know what the culture in Heaven is like so that I can model my life in that way instead of modeling my life to fit the culture of America or the culture of South Carolina or the culture of someone who was born and raised in Ohio and now lives in South Carolina.

What would that look like?