After being away for 10 days or so I am finally home. There is something immensely good about being home. Whenever I go anywhere I am reminded that I don't really fit. I mean everywhere but home I have to figure out how to fit. Even if I am at someone's house for the evening. I use the little half bath that people have off the kitchen and I have to wonder if I should use the little dinky towel they have hanging there or if it is for decoration like ours at home. I usually wash my hands and wipe them on my pants. I will be spending the night at a friend's house later this week and in the morning I will open three or four cabinets before I find the coffee cups. But home is different. Home fits me. Everything is where I put it or know where it is. I am comfortable in my home not only with the stuff I have but of course with the people who are there. I think it is interesting that we all have a built in desire for a home. A place where we know how to be just us. I think that is a deep instinct we have all had since we left the Garden of Eden. We keep trying to create a home like the one we have missed since the beginning of time. The good news is that Jesus is making us one right now. When Jesus says to Thomas in John 14 that he is going to prepare a place for us he doesn't stop there. The most important part of that whole conversation is when Jesus says," So that where I am you may be too". That is what we miss the most. Just like when I walked into my house Thursday morning after being gone for 10 days, the experience wasn't complete until my wife came to hug me and that is when I knew I was really home. Some day I will close my eyes for the last time and when I open them it will be Jesus' face I see and I will finally know I am home.
Join in realizing the vision of Christ Community Chapel with Senior Pastor Joe Coffey
3 comments:
After a root canal yesterday, I long to be home sooner than later! Glad your back safely Joe.
This posting brought tears to my eyes. Both tears of sadness and tears of gladness. My earthly "home" is familiar and pretty much comfortable to me and yes, there are people there that I love and who love me. But a lot of days I still feel out of place even in my own "home". I'm there attending to my everyday busyness but yet feeling that's there more, that's there's something else to come, something else I should be doing. Sometimes I have a hard time deciphering if I'm paying too much attention to current cultural thinking (doing, being, having) or if what I sense is truly spiritual unrest. I read book sometime back back called "Longing for Home" that goes along with what you're saying, Joe. There IS a deep instinct we all have, a longing, and a knowing that there is something else. A heavenly home. And some days I'm so homesick it's a challenge to focus on the job at hand. But I love your line... some day all sad things will become untrue (and all unclear things will become clear, and all disrest will become peaceful). What an amazing hope!
Really good comments. The line "all sad things become untrue" is a line from Lord of the Rings. J.R.R. Tolkein wrote the Lord of the Rings as an allegory to the gospel. All the heroes of the story if put together are supposed to form a composite Christ. Home is something God has placed deep down in us. The longing and hunger like so many other longings is only barely touched by the things of this world. It is a reminder that we are not made for this world but only passing through.
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