Where is home?

I’ve always had trouble answering the question: “Where are you from?”

California with its palm trees and sunshine and crowded freeways? West Texas with the smell of oil and cattle and the beautiful sunsets – unbroken by any tree lines? Tennessee with the rich dark earth and tall, green forests? The softly rolling hills of North Eastern Oklahoma? Perhaps Africa with the smell of hot sun and sweat, dust and heat, with the sun scorched grasses and flat topped trees?

All of these. And yet none of these.

Home is not a place. Home is people.

This is true even and especially of heaven. What makes heaven so very beautiful, so very appealing is that Jesus is there – and all that he represents: life and joy, peace and victory, beauty in its purest form. In heaven we get to commune fully and blissfully with God, in unimaginable glory, with unimaginable beauty. There we will not be hindered by sickness, weariness, and death. We will praise the Lamb for eternity. We will marvel in His presence. And then add to that meeting all the faithful ones who have gone on before us: Moses and Paul, Ruth and Esther, Lydia, Eunice and Lois, all the missionaries, all the saints who have quietly persevered.

We can find a piece of “home” here on earth wherever we find our Christian brothers and sisters (in them, I think, we can also see Jesus). We can be in Timbuktu or windswept Arizona or deep in the Ecuadorian rainforest and still find a piece of that home.

And yet, the home we long for is heaven. If we are truly living the Christian life, we won’t fit in here. We will be weird, misunderstood, sometimes lonely, sometimes persecuted. All the trials, all the hard times make us long for something better. They make us  yearn for home.

Heaven. Heaven is home.

Are you feeling homesick today?