Home…a place of familiarity, love, comfort, acceptance, and peace.
Home…a place where you are known and loved.
Home…a place of rest where you can let go of your usual stresses and step back for a moment and be the child again.
Home…a place where history happens and memories are made.
Even in my mid-forties I love to go “home”, the place my parents created for us, where my mom is and my family congregates for the special and the everyday occasions. I don’t always recognize the homesickness I get for the comfort and care of being home now that I have a home of my own.
But there is something real about that homesickness. Longing for the place and people with whom your life melts together from the time you were born, through the becoming years, the marriages, births and deaths; where the myriad of moments melt into memories and make us family.
There is a release; a full-bodied inhale and healing, heavenly exhale when I sink down on the well-worn sofa next to my mom in the home that she and my dad created for me and my sisters.
I know not everyone’s home is a sweet home. Not everyone finds returning to their parents’ house the place of respite and peace that I do. It is a huge blessing to me and my sisters and one of the many good and perfect gifts that God gave my family and for that I am most grateful. That being said, we have our fair share of typical family issues.
It’s not perfect but it is home.
Even if you don’t feel the way I do about going home, I do believe we all have a homesickness for a place where love rules unconditionally, where there is always forgiveness, comfort, acceptance and peace. Our hearts long for the place where we can be fully known and fully loved. Where we can release all the stresses and pressures of this life into the hands of the One who said, “Come to me all you who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest.
Our Father in heaven beckons us to come to Him, to the home He has made for us. Jesus has gone before us to prepare a place for us. Our homesickness is for Him, to be with Him forever.
The Apostle Paul describes it this way in his second letter to the Corinthians:
Meanwhile we groan, longing to be clothed instead with our heavenly dwelling, because when we are clothed, we will not be found naked. For while we are in this tent, we groan and are burdened, because we do not wish to be unclothed but to be clothed instead with our heavenly dwelling, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. Now the one who has fashioned us for this very purpose is God, who has given us the Spirit as a deposit, guaranteeing what is to come. V.2-5
Our homesickness is from Him. Know that as much as we long to be with Him, He longs to be with us more. Home Sweet Heaven is His idea and He would do anything for you to be with Him forever. In fact He already did. He gave His very life for you to be home with Him in paradise.