[Taken from No Longer Strangers by Gregory Coles. Copyright (c) 2021 by Gregory Coles. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press, P.O. Box 1400, Downers Grove, IL 60515, USA. www.ivpress.com]

My siblings and I were each born three years apart, like clockwork: 1981, 1984, 1987, 1990. In 1993, when I was three, we moved to Bandung, Indonesia. We furloughed back to the United States every third summer—1996, 1999, 2002, 2005—and beginning with furlough Number Two, an older sibling remained in the U.S. to start college….

Once I was old enough to count by threes, I was perpetually counting down to my next life-altering trip around the globe. Five months of itinerant American existence, another sibling casualty to higher education, more plane rides, and then two-and-a-half years back in my Indonesian home until I was the one not returning.

Indonesia and the United States seemed to belong in two different universes. Air smelled different, buildings looked different, food tasted different, and the people acted different. Cars were built in mirror images of each other and drove on opposite sides of the road. Different animals participated in daily life: Where America had domesticated pets, Indonesia had neighborhood-browsing chickens and tiny lizards called cicak, which crawled along our house’s concrete walls eating mosquitoes.

It was as if each country had been invented by a fantasy author living in the other country. Everything was similar but fundamentally altered, a zany storybook reinvention of itself. All the colors were reassigned; all the horses turned into unicorns.

Case in point: milk. Our Indonesian milk came in flimsy, one-liter plastic bags delivered on the back of a motorcycle. The milk was unhomogenized, its pale cream clinging to the bags as we emptied them into a pitcher. We saved the cream, one tiny trickle at a time, in a plastic Tupperware container in the freezer, until we’d stored up enough to churn in the blender and make a precious lump of butter. (Real dairy butter was exorbitantly expensive, so we mostly used tubs of Meadow Lea brand margarine. Cholesterol-free, the tub proudly announced. My best friend Zack and I, delighted by the rhyme, wouldn’t simply ask people to please pass the butter; instead, we said, “I have a plea for the Meadow Lea cholesterol-free.”)

When our fresh milk ran out or soured, or when the delivery motorcycle broke down, or when we traveled to places without good refrigeration, Indonesia had other milk options. We would beat milk powder and water into a beige froth, or we’d buy ultra-high temperature (UHT) milk, which came in waxy boxes and could last for months at room temperature.

Whether fresh, powdered, or boxed, we called all these drinks “milk.” But none of them tasted much like the American beverage, purchased in plastic jugs at grocery stores. American milk boasted of its cream content with percentile names and yet, somehow, had no streaks of cream floating on its surface. It was delicious, but almost too delicious, like one of those absurdly good-looking and talented people you want to hate because they are insufficiently flawed.

When I drank Indonesian milk, the thought of American milk felt fictional. When I drank American milk, Indonesian milk became something from a dream. My world was defined by the nation I lived in at any given moment. The other nation—its sights and smells and patterns of life—felt as distant as a fairy tale.

/ / /

Airplanes and airports were the portals between my universes. They were the in-between thing, neither fully American nor fully Indonesian, and I loved them for that. Unlike every other nonhuman feature of my life, air travel was the same in every country. I returned to it again and again, familiarity increasing my fondness, celebrating its landmarks like a treasured vacation destination:

Ah, beloved ticketing counters, where we weigh our checked bags and repack at the last minute to avoid overweight costs! Ah, joyous security lines, an endless flow of testy strangers getting partially undressed together! Ah, overpriced duty-free shops and overcrowded boarding gates and overworked flight attendants with kerchiefs around their necks welcoming us aboard! Ah, carry-on luggage jammed in overhead compartments, seats too close together, lavatories with frighteningly loud toilets, tray tables in their upright and locked position!

“Airports are so homey,” I told my parents when I was in high school. We were in the Jakarta airport at the time— not an airport that inspired gladness in the average traveler.

My parents gave each other meaningful looks that said, What have we done to this child? Is the damage permanent? Do we have enough in savings to cover his future counseling fees?

The truth was, knowing that all my fellow travelers felt displaced put me at ease. Perhaps my delight was partly schadenfreude, but I suspect it ran far deeper. In all my other homes, someone else had more right to call the place “home” than I did. Indonesia belonged to its citizens first and foremost, and to me only in a partial and secondary way. As for the United States, I was barely more than a glorified tourist, no matter what my birth certificate said.

But in airports, for once, I belonged just as much as everyone else. I could be a misfit in airports, because airports are entirely populated by misfits, and when everyone is out of place, everyone belongs.

For once, I could be the same as the people around me. No one was staying; we were all just passing through….

/ / /

In the Hebrews 11 “Hall of Faith,” the first evidence given for Abraham’s radical faith is his radical itinerancy:

By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going. By faith he made his home in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country; he lived in tents, ...(Heb 11:8–9)

Abraham’s testimony is the kind that doesn’t get much airtime in evangelical churches today. There’s no tidy ending to the story of his homelessness. He journeys into the unknown and never emerges in a country that feels like his own. He spends his whole life in the middle, a stranger on the way to somewhere. By faith, he makes his home in airplanes and airports.

I can almost hear present-day pastors and elders declining Old Abe’s offer to speak at their churches. They ward him off with firm handshakes and pats on the shoulder: It sounds like your story isn’t quite ready to be shared yet. You just need to wait on God a little longer. Once you get fully settled in the promised land, we’d love to hear that testimony of God’s faithfulness.

But Abraham’s faith is exemplary precisely because he’s still a stranger at the end of the story. Even the land he’s buried on has to be bought specifically for that purpose, because no piece of the promised land belongs to him. His faith is a foreigner’s faith, an unsexy faith. Instead of taking him all the way home, Abraham’s faith takes him only as far as the promise of home. And this, apparently, is the point of the story:

"All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners and strangers on earth.   They were longing for a better country—a heavenly one. Therefore, God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them." (Heb 11:13,16)

If Abraham hadn’t still been longing for something at the end of the story, he wouldn’t have been living by faith anymore. The longing, the waiting, the uncertainties, and tents, and promises—these were the things that marked him as an alien. And God, whose kingdom has no immigration bans and no extradition treaties, is eager to make homeless aliens into citizens.