I wonder if Saturn will continue to evade me when I rise from bed just as Friday becomes Saturday. Changing my pajamas for outdoor clothes, I venture to the driveway where, weather permitting, I will set up my scope and camera. As I squeak open the gate, an uncollared calico cat slinks to the far end of the drive, glaring in silent, crystalline, side-eyed reprimand of my sudden appearance in her nocturnal stalking domain—“What are you doing here? You don’t belong.”—before skulking off into the darkness.
Before Barnabas intercedes for him, the early church looks askance at Paul when he emerges in Jerusalem following his conversion. “And when he had come to Jerusalem, he attempted to join the disciples. And they were all afraid of him, for they did not believe that he was a disciple. But Barnabas took him and brought him to the apostles and declared to them how on the road he had seen the Lord, who spoke to him, and how at Damascus he had preached boldly in the name of Jesus” (Acts 9:26-27).
Peter borrows Hosea’s irony to tell those who did not belong that they do now: “Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy” (1 Peter 2:10).
That night, at the end of the driveway, Saturn does cooperate—sliding between clouds just long enough for me to set up the scope and take some pictures. My feline friend returns, too, perhaps just to see what made me change my clothes and come outside.
When we become someone we were not, or do something we had not; when we stop ignoring a need and begin to meet it; when we forgive the ones we used to reject, or correct the ones we used to approve; when we receive faith or grow in it—the new clothes make us feel like imposters; those in our new surroundings may suspect our appearance. But the one who gave us faith and changed us has made it clear: the clothes are ours, as is the driveway. We may not have belonged before, but we do now.
To a week walking in faith, exactly where we belong.