Tag: home

Longing to go Home

Longing to go Home

Life is brief. “Certainly every man at his best state is but vapor” (Psalm 39:5).  Death is necessary.  “It is appointed unto man once to die” (Heb. 9:27).  We are but a moment’s sunlight, fading in the grass.

We view death as the enemy, and indeed, it is.  It brings separation, suffering and sorrow.  As Christians, we do not glorify death or minimize it in any way when we say that, horrible as death may be, we long for what is beyond it: A home with God.

Many of us have had the experience of being away from home for an extended period.  Invariably, there comes a point when we want to go home.  On trips to third world countries, the thing that bothers me the most is not the primitive conditions, the strange food, the lack of hot water, the tick bites, the police road blocks, or the cold nights in a tent or unheated building.  It’s the longing to be home with family.

In New York in the spring of 1927, Lillian Alling, a poor young immigrant girl, became very homesick and decided to return to her family in Russia.  Because she had saved only $100 and would not accept lifts from strangers, she set out to walk the 12,000 miles home.  Equipped with maps, a knapsack and an iron rod for protection, this fragile girl passed through Chicago, Winnipeg, British Columbia, the Yukon and Alaska, arriving in Nome in July of  1929.  It was just the halfway mark of her incredible journey.  Soon after leaving Nome, she was spotted approaching the far western tip of Alaska.  That was the last anyone on this continent is known to have seen or heard of her.  She apparently succeeded, as she had planned, in obtaining a boat and rowing across the 36 miles of the Bering Strait to Siberia.  She really wanted to go home, didn’t she?  Do we?  We should!

Listen to the way the apostle Paul describes the Christian’s desire to go to heaven in 2 Corinthians 5:1-2.  He writes, “For we know that if the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this tent we groan, longing to put on our heavenly dwelling.”  We groan, longing for home!

If you look carefully at the text in 2 Corinthians 5, you’ll see that Paul’s longing to go home was founded firmly in the confidence that he had a home to go to.  “We are confident,” he says, “yes, well pleased rather to be absent from the body and to be present with the Lord” (2 Cor. 5:8).  This confidence was based on faith in God, and in the recognition of all that God has done to prepare us for the journey from mortality to life.  “For we walk by faith, not by sight.” “Now He who has prepared us for this very thing is God” (2 Cor. 5:7, 5).

Nearly everybody will tell you that they want to go to heaven, but how many are willing to walk the long walk of faith to get there?  How many are willing to let God prepare them, rather than just assuming that they are prepared already? How many have a confident longing to go home?  Do you?

– Steve Klein

If you enjoyed these thoughts about heaven, please share them with your friends!

When My Father Calls Me Home

running homeI remember doing something when I was a youngster that kids don’t do much anymore — playing outside!  If dad or mom wanted me, they’d usually just open the front door and holler down the street, “Steve!”  If I was within earshot, I’d come a runnin’.  When I got there I’d be informed as to why I was called home. Maybe there was a chore to do, maybe it was time to get ready for church, or maybe it was supper time!  Of course, occasionally I was called home because I was in trouble; perhaps I hadn’t finished my chores, or my father wasn’t pleased with my work. For this reason, the moments between when I heard the call to come and when I came running up to the door were sometimes anxious ones.

As a father calls his children to come home, our Heavenly Father will one day call each of us home. We do not want that moment to be one of doubt, anxiety, or fear — and it doesn’t have to be.

The end of a good life is like a parent calling a child home after the child has done his chores and then spent an afternoon playing joyfully in the neighborhood.  One elderly Christian whose friends and loved ones had passed on before him said that he felt that he just got to stay and play a little longer.  But no matter how long we may stay, this life will end for each of us, and the Lord will call us:  “For man goes to his eternal home, And the mourners go about the streets” (Ecclesiastes 12:5).

After death, there’s judgment (Hebrews 9:27).  And that is the thing that can create a lot of anxiety about being called home if we are not prepared.  “For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that each one may receive the things done in the body, according to what he has done, whether good or bad” (2 Corinthians 5:10).

Once, when I was in the fourth grade, I was playing with friends down at the end of the block on the street where we lived.  I heard my dad calling in the distance, and, as usual, I immediately started sprinting home.  It wasn’t really time for supper, so I was thinking maybe this time I was in trouble!  Had I forgotten to do something I was supposed to do?  My mind raced faster than my feet.  I ran up the steps of the front porch to find my dad sitting there looking at the newspaper. He’d hurt his back at work recently and was in quite a bit of pain.  He looked up at me and asked me to pick up the rubber band from the newspaper that he’d dropped on the ground.  I was tired from running home.  But I was glad.  Glad to be home.  Glad to do something, even though it was a small thing, to serve my dad.

If we have been happy to serve our heavenly Father here, we will be happy to be called home to serve Him there.  If by His grace we have lived lives of purity and holiness here, we will be truly at home in His presence.  Let us “be diligent to be found by him without spot or blemish, and at peace” when He calls us home (2 Peter 3:14, ESV).  Let us look forward to receiving “the things done in the body” because we’ve done the good things that our Father has asked us to do.

If you enjoyed these thoughts about heaven, please share them with your friends!