Continuing * “Home” . . . Max Lucado wrote in his book ‘Traveling Light’: “One of those occasions came on the side of a country road. The hour was late, and I was lost. I’d stopped to pull out a flashlight and a map. To my right was a farmhouse. In the farmhouse was a family. I knew it was a family because I could see them. Right through the big plate-glass window, I could see mother and father and boy and girl. Norman Rockwell would have placed them on a canvas. The mom was spooning out food, and the dad was telling a story, and the kids were laughing, and it was all I could do to keep from ringing the doorbell and asking for a place at the table. I felt so far from home.
What I felt that night, some of you have felt ever since . . .
your husband died.
your child was buried.
you learned about the lump in your breast or the spot in your lung.
Some of you have felt far from home ever since your home fell apart.
The twists and turns of life have a way of reminding us—we aren’t home here. This is not our homeland. We aren’t fluent in the languages of disease and death. The culture confuses the heart, the noise disrupts our sleep, and we feel far from home.
And, you know what? That’s OK.
Homesickness is one of the burdens God doesn’t mind if we carry. We, like Molly, are being prepared for another house. And we, like the parakeet from Green Bay, know we aren’t there yet.
Pootsie was her name. She escaped from her owner and came into the keeping of the humane society. When no one else claimed her, Sue Gleason did. They hit it off. They talked and bathed together becoming fast friends. But one day the little bird did something incredible. If flew over to Mrs. Gleason, put her beak in her ear, and whispered, “Fifteen hundred South Oneida Street, Green Bay.”
Gleason was dumbfounded. She researched and found the address existed. She went to the house and found a seventy-nine-year-old man named John Stroobants.
“Do you have a parakeet?” she asked.
“I used to; I miss him terribly.’
When he saw his Pootsie, he was thrilled. “You know, he even knows his phone number.”
The story isn’t a crazy as you might think. You have an eternal address fixed in your mind as well. God has “set eternity in the hearts of men” (Eccles. 3:11). Down deep you know you are not home yet.
So be careful not to act like you are. Don’t lower the duffel bag too soon. Would you hang pictures on the wall of a Greyhound bus? Do you set up a bedroom at the road side rest stop? Do you load your king-size bed on a commercial flight?
Would you treat this world like home? It isn’t. The greatest calamity is not to feel far from home when you are, but to feel right at home when you are not. Don’t quench, but rather stir this longing for heaven.
God’s name is forever home. “And will dwell in the house of the Lord forever” (Psalms 23:6).
My friends Jeff and Carol just adopted two small children. Christopher, the older, is only three, but he knows the difference between Jeff’s house and the foster home form which he came. He tells visitors, “This is my forever home.”
Won’t it be great when we say the same? Couldn’t we use a forever home? This home we live in won’t last forever. Birthdays remind us of that.
(Posts with a preamble asterisk * are for a more general audience, and not specific to teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.)
