Songs For The Road: Music For Tired Feet

Introduction

I want to begin this morning with words that many of us recognize—not because they are complicated, but because they are honest. They weren’t written to impress anyone. They weren’t written to explain theology. They were written to be carried.

I’m but a stranger here,

Heaven is my home;

Earth is a desert drear,

Heaven is my home.

Danger and sorrow stand

Round me on every hand;

Heaven is my fatherland,

Heaven is my home.

Some of you grew up with words like these.

Others are hearing them for the first time.

Whether the hymn is familiar or new, most of us recognize the feeling behind it.

Being a stranger.

Not in the sense of being lost—but in the sense of not being fully settled anywhere. As if life keeps moving, but there’s no place where you finally exhale. No moment when everything softens and stays that way. Home carries pressure instead of rest. Bodies don’t cooperate the way they once did. Sickness shows up uninvited. Finances stay tight. Work takes more than it gives back. Marriages strain, or disappoint, or ache with absence. And even when things are “fine,” there’s a low, persistent sense underneath it all that says, Is this really it?

We all know that feeling.

It’s the feeling of living in between. Not broken beyond hope—but not whole either. Not lost—but not home. Still walking. Still carrying weight. Still trying to be faithful in the middle of unfinished circumstances.

That’s why the language of being a stranger resonates so deeply. Not because we dislike this world, but because nothing in it quite holds us the way we hoped it would. No relationship, no achievement, no season of life seems able to bear the full weight of our longing. There is no place where everything finally lines up and stays there.

And beneath that shared experience is something else we all know, whether we name it or not: we are in process.

Our lives are unfinished. Our stories are still unfolding. Our faith is still learning how to breathe under pressure. We are becoming, growing, adjusting—sometimes slowly, sometimes painfully.

The question isn’t whether we’re in process.

The question is why.

Are we in process to become something we are not yet?

Or are we in process because we already are something, and this is what the road looks like?

That distinction matters more than we usually realize.

Most of us live as if we are still auditioning—for stability, for peace, for approval, even for God’s favor. We assume that once we get far enough down the road, once things improve, once we handle life better, then we’ll rest. Then we’ll belong. Then we’ll feel secure.

But what if that assumption is part of what’s exhausting us?

What if the weight we feel isn’t just the length of the road, but the pressure of trying to prove something while we’re walking it?

There is a small collection of psalms in Scripture often called the Songs of Ascents. They were carried by people who were still on the road—travelers heading toward Jerusalem, taking step after step, year after year. These weren’t psalms for people who had arrived. They were for people who were still walking.

And they weren’t written to explain the journey. They were written to steady it.

They functioned less like lectures and more like work songs—words spoken together to help people keep going. Not to deny danger or difficulty, but to remind one another who they were while they walked.

That’s the register we’re going to stay in today.

Not explanation first, but orientation.

Not arrival, but movement.

Not performance, but endurance.

Because the deepest pressure most of us feel isn’t simply that life is hard. It’s the quiet fear that the hardness means something about us—that maybe we’re behind, or lacking, or somehow not measuring up.

And that pressure raises a question we rarely say out loud, but often feel:

Are we walking this road to become someone who finally belongs?

Or are we walking because we already belong—and we’re learning how to live from that?

That question sits at the center of everything that follows.

--- Part 1 — The Road and the Stranger

That feeling of being a stranger is not accidental. Scripture never treats it as a defect or a failure. It treats it as a condition of life lived honestly in a world that is unfinished.

The moment we assume that faith should remove that feeling, we begin to misread our lives. We interpret pressure as punishment. Delay as disfavor. Struggle as evidence that something is wrong with us. But the Bible does not diagnose dislocation as rebellion. Often, it names it as awareness.

You feel like a stranger because you know—deep down—that this world, as good and beautiful as it can be, is not capable of bearing the full weight of your hope. It was never designed to. When we expect it to, the strain shows up everywhere: in our bodies, in our relationships, in our work, in our restlessness.