{"id":7055,"date":"2021-04-06T11:20:16","date_gmt":"2021-04-06T01:20:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.stmark.com.au\/Blogs\/?p=7055"},"modified":"2021-04-06T11:32:28","modified_gmt":"2021-04-06T01:32:28","slug":"the-stranger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.stmark.com.au\/Blogs\/the-stranger\/","title":{"rendered":"The Stranger"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>\n

The Stranger<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By Fr Antonios Kaldas<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Original post By Fr\nAntonios Kaldas blogsite, 13 Sep 2007<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

The little boy walked out of the\nclassroom and on to the crowded school playground. Everywhere he looked, he\ncould see kids. Kids chatting away happily. Kids playing games excitedly. Kids\nchugging down sandwiches ravenously. Lots of happy, contented, comfortable kids\n\u2026 except one.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The little boy walked slowly across\nthe playground, hoping that someone would say something to him. They didn\u2019t. He\nstopped to watch a soccer game optimistically, hoping someone would invite him\nto join. They didn\u2019t. Finally, awkwardly, he reached a bench by the fence under\na tree. He sat down, alone, and began to chew on his lunch, trying all the time\nto look as if he was deep in thought, and sitting alone by choice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, he wasn\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Have you ever had an experience like\nthis? If you have, then you probably grew up with a fear of being the outcast.\nyou will understand perfectly the horror of the kind of situation I have just\ndescribed. There\u2019s no doubt about it: being the stranger, the outcast, must be\none of the worst experiences in the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Or is it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was one Outcast who didn\u2019t seem\nto mind very much. He sort of hung around with other outcasts and strangers,\nuntil He sort of made His own little circle that every stranger could feel a\npart of. This new circle was well outside the normal \u2018in crowd\u2019, and most of\nthose in the in crowd smirked and then wondered, and then grew jealous and\ndecided to squish it. But the nice thing is that although they thought they\nsquished it, it is still growing bigger.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even now, strangers and outcasts are\nfinding this society of outcasts, and being welcomed with open arms. In fact,\nmost people don\u2019t ever find their way into it until they are outcasts and\nstrangers. Which means that you generally don\u2019t get in unless you\u2019re pretty\ndown and out, at the end of your tether, on your last legs, and any other\nmetaphor you can think of.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Funnily enough, we spend most of our\nlives pretty much trying to avoid joining this group, and thus never get to\nmeet it\u2019s wonderful Founder. We invest a tremendous amount of effort and time\ninto fitting in<\/em> and making ourselves feel at home<\/em>.\nWe do this in a hundred different ways. We are doing it when we laugh at that\ncrude joke, or let ourselves get so attached to that electronic gadget, or feel\nthat we are part of the furniture at work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I learned how to be a stranger at a young age when my family had to move from the house I had grown up in. I loved that house! On the last day, I even secretly gave the wall a kiss to say goodbye (I\u00a0was\u00a0<\/em>pretty young). I learned that day that it is painful to be too attached to any material thing on this earth, because sooner or later, you are going to have to lose it, and then it would feel like you are losing a part of yourself. Better not to let it become such an important part of yourself in the first place!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But you have to be attached to\nsomething. No one can live their life in a sort of free fall! Every single one\nof us has to belong<\/em> somewhere. Enter the Stranger. The nice\nthing about Him is that He will never disappear on you. Never. Ever. When you\nfeel you belong to Him, you feel like you don\u2019t need to belong to anything\nelse. You have your identity, you know who you are, you know where your house\nis (and your treasure and your heart also).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2026 and we too who are sojourners in\nthis world, keep us in Your faith, and grant us Your peace until the end \u2026<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Original\nblog found at- http:\/\/www.frantonios.org.au\/2007\/09\/13\/the-stranger\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Stranger By Fr Antonios Kaldas Original post By Fr Antonios Kaldas blogsite, 13 Sep 2007 The little boy walked out of the classroom and on to the crowded school playground. Everywhere he looked, he could see kids. Kids chatting away happily. Kids playing games excitedly. Kids chugging down sandwiches ravenously. Lots of happy, contented, … Continue reading “The Stranger”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":7056,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[483],"class_list":["post-7055","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorised","tag-stranger"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.stmark.com.au\/Blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7055","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.stmark.com.au\/Blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.stmark.com.au\/Blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stmark.com.au\/Blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stmark.com.au\/Blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7055"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.stmark.com.au\/Blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7055\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7060,"href":"http:\/\/www.stmark.com.au\/Blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7055\/revisions\/7060"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stmark.com.au\/Blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7056"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.stmark.com.au\/Blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7055"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stmark.com.au\/Blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7055"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stmark.com.au\/Blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7055"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}