The Wrong Star

The Wrong Star

Years ago on a trip to Oxford, England, I met a man who had known author G. K. Chesterton. This chance encounter with an octogenarian book collector from London resulted in a most delightful conversation and the purchase of two treasured books. One is a first edition of Orthodoxy and the other a collection of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poetry from Chesterton’s own library, bearing his personal bookplate and his quirky, artistic signature.

Chesterton himself was something of a misfit: a Roman Catholic in a country of Anglicans, a bachelor until he was twenty-seven, and a large, heavy man easily identified, if not by his profile, then by the cape, small glasses, and cane that frequently enhanced his wardrobe.

Maybe that very oddness lies at the source of this Chesterton gem; one of my favorites: “We have come to the wrong star. . . . That is what makes life at once so splendid and so strange. . . . The true happiness is that we don’t fit. We come from somewhere else.”^a

Do you ever feel like a misfit? At uncomfortable odds with the world—or maybe just slightly out of sync with its rhythms? I do. But perhaps I shouldn’t mind so much. The apostle Paul felt it too. We are children of God, he said, waiting to be released from futility into glory. We are not misplaced, but we are not at home, either. We’re destined for another home, and our true identity—mostly hidden now—will one day be made plain (see Romans 8:20-25).

The trick is to recognize our misfit, wrong-star status as the very thing that makes this passing life “so splendid and so strange.” To embrace our Christ-born oddness as a glorious mark of sonship, in this our beautiful, awful, temporary exile—to see the fact that we don’t fit in as our one true happiness.

How about you? Are you out of place too? Well then, blessings from one grateful, wandering alien to another. Let us always speak of our homeland with love.

His Spirit joins with our spirit to affirm that we are God’s children.

Romans 8:16

^a G. K. Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles (New York: Dodd, Mead, and Company, 1910), 314.