Longing for Home

 
There is something about going home that is comforting and exciting at the same time, an almost magical feeling.  This is especially true when one has been absent for some length of time:  you long for the familiar sounds of the voices of your loved ones and the familiar comfort of your own bed.

This is the longing I feel tonight.  After 2 weeks of classes, I stand on the eve of my trek back to Appomattox.  My time at school has been both enlightening and challenging, but I’m ready to go home.  I miss my bed and my favorite chair and my own shower; but more than these things, I miss my friends, my family, and especially my wife.

In many of us, from time to time we feel that sort of longing – or at least a similar sort of longing, at once less defined and more acute.  It is the desire for Home – the desire for dwelling in the presence of God.  The Bible tells the story of God creating us for life on earth – but life on earth in close communion with God.  That communion, we are told, was rejected by those who went before.  Relationship with God became more distant, and communion with God was hindered.

And yet, there remained (and remains) a longing for Home, a longing for the presence of God.  C.S. Lewis, in his classic Mere Christianity, puts it this way:

“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”








We were made for another world – a world not defined as somewhere else, but a world defined by being with someone else.  This is the world seen from afar by John the Seer in Revelation:

“And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Look!  God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them.  They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God.  He will wipe every tear from their eyes.  There will be no more pain or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” (Rev. 21:3-4)

I don’t know about you, but that feels like home to me.  We long for it to come in full, to experience it as John describes it.  Yet like him, we see it from afar.  Let us look forward to it with the joy and peace of the greatest homecoming imaginable, while seeking to make that world, that Home, more and more real now.  As we draw close to the heart of God, we draw close to Home.

In Christ,

Adam