BEING an outsider most days of your life, because you do not belong, you are of different size, texture, color, tribe, or you cannot dance to the common tune, is lonely.
You are lost to your world and uncommitted to anything else, but to get on with yourself, and to wherever the journey takes you.
That is what Jason Aldean's song, "Just Passing Through," tells me. "I am just lucky being here... to enjoy the pleasures of life," just like that.
"It is one big party crash, I may love you and everything seems to go fast. Good or bad, it is your world, your choice."
I may have not heard it right, but it is how Mr. Aldean's western song sounded in my hearing.
Great, isn't it? It enhanced your loneliness, even more. Worse, it makes existence meaningless.
There is another song, with the same title. I think it is a Negro spiritual that originated from the Continental American South.
During its age and time, racism and hatred, made people like the Negroes feel they do not belong to humankind.
"This world is not my home, I'm just passing through.
My treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue.
The angels beckon me from Heaven's open door.
And I can't feel at home in this world anymore..."
They're all expecting me and that's one thing I know.
My Savior pardoned me and now I onward go.
I know He'll take me through, though I am weak and poor.
... O, Lord... I have no friend like you...
I can't feel at home in this world anymore."
My thoughts and feelings of being isolated or marginalized in this life cannot fathom the experiences of the Negro race when they were enslaved for centuries by White America. But during such times, you look to Divine Providence for help and comfort.
In exchange for dignity, freedom, and heaven, you forsake power, positions, titles, and wealth -- anything that is earthly as the Negro slaves did. You are hopeless in this life but full of hope of seeing another home, and that it is all that matters.
Why, because heaven demands from you to do all you can in this world for your master, enemy, friends, and family with excellence that comes from love. You must be a virtuous man or woman and this mattered to any and all great souls.
Some Negroes did well, on this score. They did not hate under an environment of slavery, even if they sought freedom and the best for their lives in an America that is supposedly the "home of the brave, and the free" not the reverse that is evolving for the worst in that land today.
To Christians and the spiritual world alike, we owe so much about the demonstration of divine love, and utterance of poetic speech that truly inspires human greatness and civil societies in this life, to the Negro race.
For me, I need to learn from their humility demonstrated by their great men and women each day. "The world is not my home" but wherever I will be, I must do justice and good work to the best I can.
If planting a tree is all I can do best, I shall plant as many for this world, which is home to humanity, but not for me.
I desire and leave you peace that gives understanding to one and all!