Home

September 21, 2019

It’s good to be home. We’ve only been gone overnight, but opening the front door and stepping through felt so good. I know the word home doesn’t carry for everyone the pleasant nuances it holds for me. For some, it’s a place of tension, uncertainty, and fear, where brutality and anger reside. Others have spent so much of their lives moving from one place to another that home is simply where they sleep at night; still others, living on the streets or migrating in large caravans, cannot even describe home. 

As nice and welcoming as it can be staying somewhere else, I still like home. Ours doesn’t have the elegance of a Victorian mansion, the appointments of a five star hotel, nor the simplicity of a primitive cabin, but its walls echo with years of love and peace, and its rooms are filled with the symbols of our life together. It’s where my heart and soul rests and my spirit soars.

The people of God are described as pilgrims traveling through a foreign land with no place to call home. Jesus described himself as someone who hadn’t a place to lay his head, and the Bible reminds us that here we have no permanent home; we’re always seeking our place of eternal rest. If the home we have here is any indication, a precursor of our home to come, even if my corner of it is on the wrong side of heaven’s tracks, I’ll be happy. In reality, the four walls that surround me are only a house. It’s Linda who makes it a home, our kids and grandkids who visit and fill it with laughter and prayer. A house is not a home unless the heart is there. Mine is here as it looks forward to the greater home Jesus has prepared for us, and I am thankful tonight.