After a very, very long day of travel, Amy and I made it home last night.
I was dead on my feet by 8:00 pm, and went to bed a little after 9:00; yet my brain woke me up at 4:00 with various random thoughts. If I ignored one, another two popped into existence, like the heads of Hydra.
Perhaps you know the feeling. Hopefully its not just me. Thoughts like:
· I wonder if Samson could beat Hercules at wrestling.
· What did Samson use for underwear?
· Did I leave my underwear at the hotel this morning?
· I wonder how often that happens?
· Do the housekeeping staff have a huge collection of random socks and underwear, or do they just throw them all away?
· They probably just throw them away; I would.
· Unless there were some really weird or ginormous pairs; I would display those to the other housekeepers.
· Why do they call the housekeepers when they are working in a hotel, not a house?
· Do people who live in apartments call their cleaners housekeepers or apartmentkeepers?
· And why are they called apartments when they are all joined together? Shouldn’t they be called jointments or something?
· Or maybe adjoinments? That sounds better.
· Also, why do they call buildings “buildings” when they are already finished with the construction? Shouldn’t they be called “builts”?
· I think Hercules would win against Samson. I mean, he held up the world, right? Unless Samson had like a thousand years to grow out his hair. Maybe that would level the field.
Anyway, despite poor sleep I am thrilled to be home. This might seem odd since our lodgings over the last two weeks were so luxurious and the places we visited so fascinating. Cruising through the Aegean rocked my world. But, as the old phrase goes, “be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home”. And besides, we have a retention pond we can view from our back deck. Almost like the Aegean if you use a little imagination.
Home is where you can be most comfortable, even more so than in a swanky hotel. At home you know where everything is. At home you get to sleep with your favorite pillows. At home you can know how to operate both the remote and the AC.
I LOVE being at home. When people say “go big or go home” they apparently have no idea how invested in going home I am. I will not be going big, thank you. Going medium-sized is the best you will get.
At the same time, I feel the term home carries some ambivalence, at least for me. I am home, but, in a way, I am not home yet.
This ambivalence reflects the same tension that the Bible displays about this world being our home. On the one hand, as the wonderful hymn says,
This is my Father’s world,
And to my listening ears
All nature sings, and round me rings
The music of the spheres.
This is my Father’s world:
I rest me in the thought
Of rocks and trees, of skies and seas;
His hand the wonders wrought.
This is my Father’s world,
The birds their carols raise,
The morning light, the lily white,
Declare their maker’s praise.
This is my Father’s world,
He shines in all that’s fair;
In the rustling grass I hear him pass;
He speaks to me everywhere.
We live in a good earth, created by a good and powerful God who deigns to let Himself be called Father. God declared of this earth, “It is good”, and He was not patting Himself on the back but making a declaration. The earth is a good and fitting abode for mankind. The earth is our rightful home, and we should be thankful and good stewards of this God-given home. Christians should be the ultimate environmentalists, for we see not only the goodness of the earth but the goodness of the earth-maker.
But, at the same time, the Bible also talks about believers as being, in some sense, not at home in this world. For example:
1 Peter 2:11 - Dear friends, I urge you, as foreigners and exiles, to abstain from sinful desires, which wage war against your soul.
2 Corinthians 5:1 - For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands.
Hebrews 11:13ff - All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners and strangers on earth. People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. Instead, they were longing for a better country—a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them.
Hebrews 13:14: For here we do not have a permanent city, but we are looking for the city that is to come.
Resolving this paradox is not too difficult if we know the Bible’s story. For our good home is still good physically, but morally has been corrupted and perverted by human sin, injustice, greed and violence. So much so that Jesus could actually refer to Satan three times as “the prince of this world” (John 12:31, 14:30, and 16:11).
Humanity’s sin has allowed Satan to have some sort of limited, but real, authority within this world. I stress limited, for it is limited both in scope (God has veto power) in effect (for God will use evil for good) and in time (for the coming Kingdom of Jesus will end all evil of all kinds). It is limited…but also real. This world, for a time, shows the garish ugliness of the Perverter, even as it also shows the sublime beauty and bounty of the Creator.
I should qualify this a bit by stressing that humanity and human culture produce many, many good and beautiful things. A sonata can stun like a sunset, and for every Hitler there is a Lincoln or a Ghandi. We should take part in, and celebrate, the good, lovely and ennobling things of this world. Our goal as Christians: “To enjoy all things in God, and God in all things”.
Our Father has given us a good home; yet it is not yet what it should be (and will be). That is why I am grateful for home, but still feel homesick. Homesick for a land I have never been to. C. S. Lewis puts it best:
In speaking of this desire for our own far off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness…it is the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name.
The books or the music in which we thought beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.
Yes, the goodness and beauty, of books, music, art, etc. “is not in them; it only comes through them”. Goodness and beauty always comes dappled and mediated in this world. We are fools to ignore the beauty and goodness of the things of earth or human culture. But we are also fools to seek them apart from their maker, to cling to the gift apart from the giver, to love only the art instead of seeking the Artist.
And that is why I am both home and homesick. I’m 63, and most of the things that I once thought would be fulfilling turned out to be as ephemeral as the leaves of autumn. But I am now seeing more and more that the wonderful things of this earthly home are both a shadow and a foretaste of a home not yet visited. And I long for the substance, not the shadow, the fullness, not the foretaste.
We are home … but not home yet.