A little over four years ago, someone spoke life-changing words to me. It sounds cliché, but I can’t imagine I am the only one who can remember a moment in time when their whole world shifted in a really good way. The words spoken were loving and even lovingly said, but they were not easy to hear. I don’t remember how I replied. I only know the effect those words had on my life, and it was a good one.
The self-proclaimed vagabond quit wandering. She quit trying to find a home on earth. She began to realize the reason it didn’t feel right wasn’t because she wasn’t living in the right place, but because it wasn’t supposed to feel right. It was Earth, and it was supposed to hurt. It wasn’t created to hurt, but it sort of turned out to be a really hurtful place. One with a lot of pain.
Over the course of the last several months, there has been a reoccurring phrase in my daily journal. “It feels like home to me.” I should have recognized the symptoms. I should have noticed it coming. I should have known I was setting myself up for disaster. Then again, it was the first place on earth that I was content allowing to become my home. How could I be blamed for walking into self-deception?
It’s the only place on earth I ever want to be, but it is not home for me. No, I do not belong here. I was made for something more.
I have been spending a significant portion of time contemplating Romans 8. The Apostle Paul wasn’t home here either. He talks about the confident hope he has for the day he will go home, and then he says something I long to experience now. “But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.”
You mean, you wait for it patiently, right Paul? Because I don’t. I wonder what it looks like to wait patiently for the redemption of my body? I find myself consistently annoyed by the waiting. I am annoyed by my body being “subject to death”. I am at least just as annoyed that the bodies of those around me are subject to death. Can we all just quit hurting now?
I could make some obvious observations – like how Paul obviously wasn’t an entitled 21st-century American, who craved instant gratification. But we all know that.
I think I want to be like him. I want to wait patiently. I wait much more patiently than I used to wait. On some level, I have begun to understand the ache will never be fully filled on earth. Something inside me will always cry out that my life is not as it should be, because it isn’t. We were made for something more.
Another phrase has reoccurred in my journal. “I want to go home to Him.” And I do. I want to be complete and whole. I want to be healed. I want to live in perfect unity with all that surrounds me. I want to live where everyone is perfectly good and every desire is fully satisfied.
Someday I will because He has promised, but right now I want to learn to wait for that day patiently. I don’t even know what patient waiting looks like, but I imagine it involves being much less surprised and upset when I experience pain. I imagine it involves interacting with love in a much different way than I do now.
For some reason, I think if I was actually waiting for the redemption of my body patiently, if I learned delayed gratification, if I actually believed what God has said about my eternal future, if I interacted with the reality that my time on earth is nothing but a minuscule dot on the timeline of my endless life, if I did these things, perhaps it would be possible for me to begin to live selflessly here.
At least for a few minutes a day.
I am so grateful someone took the time to tell me I was looking for Atlantis. It was the beginning of the end of my attempting to fill the void with materialism, sex, alcohol, power…
And every day, I am still silly enough to try to make this motel room feel like a home. I hang up proverbial pictures. I try to convince myself this is where I belong. I try to fit in. I try to feel good. I try to not hurt. Every day I forget this is just a tent. Heaven is my home.
Do you feel comfortable here on Earth? Or is there something that nags your heart deep inside telling you life shouldn’t be like this?
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