Meditation on Luke 13.24-27

"Strive to enter through the narrow door; for many, I tell you, will seek to enter and will not be able. Once the head of the house gets up and shuts the door, and you begin to stand outside and knock on the door, saying, 'Lord, open up to us!' then he will answer and say to you, 'I do not know where you are from.'  Then you will begin to say, 'We ate and drank in Your presence, and You taught in our streets'; and He will say, 'I tell you, I do not know where you are from...'"

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The Lord ends his statement with a preposition, twice.  Apparently the narrow door has something to do with more than grammar. His words ring strange though, almost bumpkin, especially spoken into the sophisticated air we currently breathe.  We strive with the question - who am I? - some of us our entire lives.  We pass the striving on to our children and our children's children - do you know who you are?  In light of Jesus' riddingly poor grammar, I wonder if our question may be too broad.

What if we narrowed our focus from who am I? to where am I from?  Some would immediately say that it is, in essence, the same question.  Well, maybe.  Who am I? ends with a pronoun - me. Where am I from? goes one beyond the me to some place, some people, something other than just the me.  What appears to be a narrowing is really an Alice-in-Wonderland door into an open plain of sorts, filled with the menagerie of our lives, people, places, things, sinners, saints, the good, the bad, and the often ugly, always a result of much more than me.  To enter that question though, you must shrink yourself.

So, where are you from?