On Going Home

Last week, my family and I went back to a place we had lived over 20 years ago. It was supposed to be a kind of home coming, but we soon realized that the old adage is quite true, you can never go home again. Almost everything was different; there were only a handful of people we knew, the house we lived in looked different, and we hardly recognized any of the streets, and had to rely on a map to get to places that were once so familiar.

The Chinese have a saying that you can never step into the same river twice. The implication is that anytime you try, the water that swirls around your ankles has moved on. It may look the same, but its not the same river. That is how we felt when we went back “home.” So many things had changed. They had moved on, like water in a river.

All of this got me to thinking about our “home” as Christians, as people of God. Our home, our citizenship, our place of origin is not in this world. The longer I live in this world, the more I understand this simple truth. As Paul says in Philippians 3:20, “But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ.” Peter says much the same thing in 1 Peter 2:10, 11.

Perhaps that is why we have such a sense that something is wrong with the world as we see it and know it. It is not what it could be; what it should be. We were meant for something else, and so was the world we live in. We know it down deep in our souls, in that part of us that yearns for something better, something more.

I have often thought that I would like to have the Pat Terry song, Home Where I Belong, sung at my funeral. Its not that I often think morbid thoughts, but rather that that particular song captures best how I feel about life here and hereafter. If you have never heard it, both B. J. Thomas (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wQgx98jmZQ) and Mark Lowry (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GP6QG_pJuSM) do a respectable job of it, but I like the 70’s Pat Terry Group version best.

No, you can never go home again, but you can go home, truly home, once and for all. God bless.