What a wonderfully confounding thing it is to be a person. We are all a complex mix of image-bearing potential for good and serpent-believing potential for wickedness, and our recognition of this tension ought to make us the most humble and yet most hopeful of all creatures.

The early reviews were gushing, ready to anoint Taylor not just as a queen of pop but as a decent candidate for the UK’s next Prime Minister. But then, as a few days passed, the curmudgeons emerged from the dark wood paneled writing pits they inhabit with critiques so vociferous, so grumpy and so personal that you would swear that Ms Swift murdered one of their children with one of the many synthesizers that she wields on this record.

Welcome to The Resident Aliens! A place of content creation and collation from a pastor who isn’t from around here.

How many of us know this story as the story of the immoral woman? I did too for many years, and there is some reasoning for that, but as I have studied it afresh, I really think we have flattened out the woman and inserted her into our context and largely ignored her own. We paint her as a flirtatious, immoral woman who refuses to settle down. She has chewed through five marriages and is now shacking up with her new boyfriend. That is how many have portrayed her, but I don’t think it is possible.

I am an introvert with a call on my life to surround myself with people. Here are some things I have learned about how to do that well.

We are ghosts or we are ancestors in the lives of our children. We either haunt, inhibit and limit from our murky pasts, or we stand as cheerleaders who push them forward beyond the limitations and failings of our own lives.

It is very difficult for the wealthy to enter the Kingdom. Very. But, it is possible with God.

We need good shepherds to do the hard and slow work of pressing some camels toward some very small openings, and we need to trust God to make them fit. That’s our only hope.

What we have realized is that to arrive somewhere is simultaneously to leave somewhere else, and in order to be immigrants to somewhere you also have to be emigrants from somewhere else. Our desire therefore hasn’t just been to be good arrivers in a new place, but also to be good leavers of our previous place.