Sojourner
All my life, I have felt less like a lonely onlooker and more like a sojourner; someone moving through a world that never quite fits. To look out at modern society, with its fractured communities and the constant drifting of moral anchor, is to feel the same throb voiced by the Psalmist: “I am a stranger on earth; do not hide your commands from me.” Psalm 119:19.
To call oneself a stranger here is to confess a deep, persistent homesickness for a place of perfect alignment. It is the recognition that the physical and moral structures built by human hands often feel fragile, self‑serving, and profoundly out of balance. In such a landscape, it is easy to worry about what humanity is doing, both to the earth we inhabit, and to the moral truth we are meant to uphold.
But the antidote to this unease is not withdrawal. It is vision. It is the prayer for opened eyes to see a law that existed long before our present wanderings.
When we were young, long before cynicism dulled our senses, we carried a quiet, uncoached instinct for justice. Not the heavy gavel of punishment. Something older, pure, and more beautiful: the restoration of balance. It is the impulse that moves us to lift a bowed head, to mend what is broken, to speak truth softly but firmly into a world filled with society on the wrong path.
This instinct is not a quirk of psychology. It is part of the design.
The English jurist William Blackstone captured this with rare clarity in his Commentaries on the Laws of England:
“The Creator has so inseparably interwoven the laws of eternal justice with the happiness of each individual, that the latter cannot be attained but by observing the former.”
Blackstone understood that true justice is not an arbitrary list of divine demands. It is woven into the fabric of human flourishing. God did not separate our joy from His righteousness; He bound them together so tightly that seeking happiness while ignoring eternal justice is like a wanderer walking resolutely in the opposite direction of home.
So when we fret over the moral and physical state of the world, Psalm 119 reminds us that the commands of God are not burdens to drag behind us. They are a map for the displaced. They are the coordinates of reality. The chaos of human history cannot unravel the eternal justice stitched into creation.
As a sojourner on this earth, you may often feel outnumbered or disoriented by what humanity is doing. But you are not walking aimlessly. The instinct for justice within you is a compass pointing toward the One who placed it there. And when the road feels lonely, we look upward, asking for our eyes to be opened to the wonderful, unchanging reality of His law, a law that promises, in the end, to restore balance to all things.
See Psalm 15