The Passport in the Drawer
Updated: Sep 2
“He charged them to take nothing for their journey except a staff—no bread, no bag, no money in their belts.”Mark 6:8
It lies in the top drawer, underneath the spare chargers and the old envelopes. You do not open it for months at a time.
Yet you know exactly where it is. The small booklet that proves you may cross a border. On paper, at least, it says you belong to a particular place.
Sometimes you take it out and look at the photograph. The face is younger. The expression is more uncertain. The document has lasted longer than several versions of you.
Jesus sent his friends out with almost nothing. No extra cloak. No bag of supplies. No paper that would make the road safe. They had to trust that they belonged to him more deeply than any official stamp could say. That did not make the road easy. It made the trust real.
A passport is a practical thing. It opens doors. It also reminds you that your presence in one country can depend on a page, and that another place may still claim you in a formal, lasting way. Both of those things can be true at once.
You close the drawer again. The passport stays in the dark, quiet and official, while you continue the ordinary work of living where you are.
The Mass does not ask us to put this document on the altar. It asks us to come as we are. At the same time, the Church has never said that earthly roots are nothing. We pray for the countries we have left and the country we now serve. We name both in the silence of the heart. Our deepest belonging is in Christ. That belonging does not cancel the other roots. It keeps them from becoming the whole story.
One day you will need the passport again. Until then it waits: a thin reminder that your life has more than one root, and that both of them are real.