1 Peter 2:11: Reading the Label Slowly

Dear friends, I urge you, as foreigners and exiles, to abstain from sinful desires, which wage war against your soul.

1 Peter 2:11 (NIV)

Reading the Label Slowly

She still reads the label twice. Years in a country where she could read none of them taught her to shop by the picture and the heft of the box, and the habit came home with her and stayed. Her own language is on the shelf now, and she goes down the aisle at the speed of a guest.

The people getting this letter had just been told they are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, God’s special possession, once not a people and now the people of God. Then, in the next breath, dear friends, and foreigners and exiles. The new citizenship leaves them standing slightly to one side of the towns they live in.

He urges them, and he calls them friends before he asks for anything. Abstain from sinful desires, which wage war against your soul. He grants those desires their full strength on the way past. They are an army with a plan, and the plan concerns you personally.

A foreigner learns the streets, works, has neighbors she would miss, keeps a recipe from the place she lives in now, and still carries papers from somewhere else. She can love this country. The war Peter names is in the thing she reaches for at nine at night when the day went badly, the small purchase that promises to close the day for her, and she knows the difference by now between wanting a thing and being recruited by it.

Knowing the difference does not win anything by itself. She has stood there with it in the cart plenty of times and gone home and eaten it. She belongs somewhere else, though, and on a good evening that is enough to make her slow down and read what she picked up.

Peter calls them friends and foreigners in the same breath, and only then asks for the hard thing. He wrote as though people could manage all three at once.