A Prayer for When You’re in Exile ft. Reverend Susan Eaton

exile is the loss of home.

It's the loss of familiarity.

It's when everything has been going along smoothly.

We feel like we have some semblance of control.

We know what to expect from everyday life.

That's home.

Exile is when all of that is suddenly flipped upside down.

when what was familiar territory now looks very foreign.

We don't know what to do next.

Maybe we don't even know what just happened.

We don't know what to think about God.

Who are you, God? Did you do this? Did you allow this? How could you allow this? How do I connect with you? What do I do next? It's any season in life that disrupts us and it leaves us disoriented.

And just longing for things to go back the way they were or for an ease of the pain, the suffering, the chaos.

It's just, that's what it is.

Your world has turned upside down.

And that word exile was not the word that I ever held in my mind for seasons like that.

But it is when I found myself in a season like that, and I went straight to the word of God for hope and clarity and The Spirit led me to read the book of Ezekiel.

I just suddenly became very curious.

And what is Ezekiel all about? A people in exile, God's people stripped away from their home and taken 500 miles away to live in a foreign land as slaves.

As refugees, as foreigners, all of their identity stripped away, everything they knew to expect from life gone.

And what do we do now? And so that word exile from their story rose to the surface for me and helped me see that story.

in essence, the way I feel.

And that's what it is with all of us.

We don't have to be in a literal, we don't have to literally be exiled people to experience a spiritual

exile.