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We’re not home yet

November 9, 2009

Posted in: Uncategorized

A good friend and former member of the Gallery Church invited several people to participate in a blog blitz or so I call it where several people blog about “home”. Thanks Elizabeth. This is fun.

Perhaps one of my greatest memories growing up was how we celebrated thanksgiving at my home. It really was amazing. My mom’s three sisters, their husbands, their children, my grandparents, and a close family friend couple would come over and spend the night. We’re talking 21 people as the norm. My cousins and I loved watching wrestling and often ordered the pay-per-view special that night (wrestling has dramatically changed these days). Back then Hulk Hogan was still telling us to say our prayers and take our vitamins. We had so much fun doing things like playing Monopoly until 2 in the morning (thanks Aunt Brenda). One of my most vivid memories would be having a fire burning in the fireplace, watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade while eating a big breakfast. Often times Thanksgiving Morning fell a few days before the big slumber party. Either way, whether it was Thanksgiving morning or the evening of the big family slumber party I was always perfectly happy that I was home. Safe. Secure. Loved. Family together. Home. It is hard to put into words how cool it is to have the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in our back yard errr city. Cool doesn’t really describe what it does for me. The Parade heightens my memories of Thanksgiving and feels as though it transports me to the past in such powerful and nostalgic way. It is crazy that such a trivial thing as a parade can have such an emotional impact on my thinking…but it really does energize me and flood my heart with joy as I remember my family and all the amazing times we had together.

Shifting gears…It is always interesting leaving TN (where home was/is for me) for NYC and saying something to Jack about going home. I usually get tickled. It is still a little awkward calling NYC home around our family in TN because that is not their reality. But calling TN home wouldn’t really make any sense to Lillie, Elliott, and Jack.

When we think past the minuscule blip of history that is this present world is in light of eternity, “home” takes on a whole new perspective. We are all too often blinded to the reality of eternity. In our blindness we seek to construct, create or cultivate the most comfortable earthly homes and wonder when are hearts seem so restless. Isn’t home where we ought to be able to rest? Yet in the most wonderful homes there is a lingering homesickness for another place. Able, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Sarah all knew they had no home here. They “acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth…seeking a homeland…desiring a better country…a heavenly one…a city God was preparing for them.” Hebrews 1:4-16 We too, as we celebrate the holidays going “home” or leaving “home” or trying to figure out where “home” now is, must remember as Stephen Curtis Chapman penned, “We are not home yet.”

A home full of hope awaits all those who put their hope in the one who has promised to go and prepare a home for us with many rooms. We are not home yet.