When I was a kid, I used to watch the 1950's sitcom "I Love Lucy" and aside from Lucille Ball and her incredible acting ability, one of the things I remember most about the show was every time Desi Arnaz would walk in the door and yell, "Lucy, I'm home!"
Flash forwards a couple of years when my family adopted a black lab we named Lucy.
Every day after school when the school bus would drop us off at home and we raced each other up the driveway slamming the kitchen screen door behind us we would yell, "Lucy, I'm hoooooooome!"
For us, it never got old, but I am sure my mother would tell a different story.
Home, for the majority of my life, has been a white farmhouse nestled next to a green rain-weathered barn on three acres of land. Home has been drafty windows in the winter and tattletale stairsteps when I was coming home past curfew. Home has been lined with pine trees to be used as cabins during the civil war and shelter when trekking into the uncharted west. Home has been vegetable gardens and tire swings.
But right now, home isn't any of those things. If I am being perfectly honest, I am not sure what home is.
My apartment in Brazil full of plants and books and a dog I picked up from the street doesn't feel like home yet, but the place I grew up in Indiana doesn't feel like home anymore either.
I remember as I was preparing to come back to Indiana after my first year in Brazil I kept saying "I am going home" but when I got there, I realized things weren't the same. Time had kept moving. People's lives changed. My life changed. My life of daily tasks and community and conversations was located somewhere else. And no matter how much I wish it could be different, the white farmhouse in Indiana was my parents' home that I could visit for a little while, but it was no longer my home.
Hebrews 13:14 tells us that Heaven is our only home that lasts forever.
And so, when it feels like I am a wandering nomad with no place to call home and no land to call my own, I can rest in the truth that anywhere I call home on Earth is a temporary and dim reflection of what my true home in Heaven will be like.
I think as we get older, we naturally start to realize how unfit this earthly home is. What we once saw with rose-colored glasses as children, starts to show an ugly underbelly as we age. We see corruption. We see injustice. We see deceit. We see sin. We see a world crumbling and full of pain.
We long for a better home.
Throughout the Bible Christians are referred to as sojourners, foreigners, strangers, and aliens. (1 Peter 1:1, 2:11-12, 1 Chronicles 29:15, Philippians 3:20).
I am not a wandering nomad simply because I am caught somewhere between Brazil and America. I am a wandering nomad because Earth itself is not where I belong.
And the more we realize this, the more we become uncomfortable with this temporary home and begin to long for our eternal home, the home we were created for, the home where we can finally be all that we were created to be in perfect sinless harmony.
You know that feeling of being home? When people around you understand your background, your culture, share core values and core beliefs and you feel like you can just take a sigh of relief?
Imagine that times a million when we are finally in Heaven.
I find myself contemplating the brevity of this life often. I find myself contemplating how, in comparison to eternity, this life is a vapor--here today and gone tomorrow.
I think I used to put a lot of stake in this earthly home of mine. I had a laundry list of things I wanted to hoard here on Earth to maximize my experience here before God took me to Heaven and I had to sing endless hymns to God forever and ever. (I really did think that was what Heaven was going to be like as a kid I didn't want to go because I thought it sounded boring.)
But now? My list of things is less important to me. Sure, there are still things I desire to have on this Earth before the Lord takes me home, but that's with the perspective that it is temporary. That I will eventually say goodbye and give back to the Lord what he has allowed me to enjoy for a time.
I think of it as a traveler on the road. On a road trip, you have a destination. Sure, if you do it well you will stop at all the cute towns along the way and maybe pick up a few trinkets to remember the places in between, but you wouldn't buy an apartment one town into the trip, sell your car and call it a day. You know each stop, each person you meet, and each experience you have is temporary and brief because you have a larger trip, a larger end goal, and what a shame it would be to get so distracted at the souvenir shop in an insignificant town along the way that you never make it to the Grand Canyon at the end of your trip.
Colossians 3:2 tells us to fixate our minds, not on the things of this temporary home, but on the things of our eternal home.
And so, for me, that means understanding that this feeling of homelessness on Earth is one stop on my way home to heaven. It means not making my white farmhouse in Indiana an idol and a source of my identity, but understanding that Heaven is the only home where I will ever feel completely at peace, completely loved, and completely at home.
And I don't know when that day will come when the Lord will take me home. It might be today, it might be tomorrow, it might be in eighty years. But no matter when he takes me, I will continue this journey as a foreigner doing my best to make the most of this vapor of a life.
You are loved and you are not alone,
S
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