Whatever Christian
Friday, January 16, 2009
Home
I have called many places home, even places I’ve never lived. Things or people feel like home just as much, if not more, than places. I feel more at home in my parents’ new house, a place I’ve never lived, than the one I call my own. I feel at home with Elmise in my arms, whether it would be in Haiti or Michigan. I am at home in the wild, whether I be surrounded by mountains or oceans or meadows. I am home when I’m surrounded by my siblings. I am at home when I’m praying and worshipping, whether it be in the quiet solitude of my bedroom or the crowded stadium of some revival tour. I feel at home in many places, but no matter where I go or who I’m with, I miss someone or something. It’s not that I can’t enjoy the situation; it’s just that there is a sometimes quiet, sometimes thunderous, longing in my heart for something more. I usually put a label on that something so that I can attempt to identify it, “I miss Haiti… I miss my mom…. I miss the mountains…” whatever it may be. I’ve said that I just need to be content with wherever I’m at, mostly because I’m aware of what other people may think, but never really believing it.

I don’t want to be content. I have dreams and longings and hopes for adventures and great accomplishments and things better than this life as we know it that I’m too stubborn to let go. So I live with this stirring of the heart not knowing what to do with it. To stifle it would be to let go of the very desires that make me who I am and to let them free would be dangerous and vulnerable. John Eldredge makes a case for the discontentment I feel in his book, The Journey of Desire. He writes, “Something awful has happened, something terrible. Something worse, even, than the fall of man. For in that greatest of all tragedies, we merely lost Paradise- and with it, everything that made life worth living. What has happened since is unthinkable: we’ve gotten used to it… Regardless of our religious or philosophical beliefs, most of us live as though this life is pretty much the way things are supposed to be” (bold mine). If becoming used to the everyday life is something awful, then I must have something right. As if to answer my question about this longing, this discontentment, Nathanial Hawthorne writes, “Our Creator would have never made such lovely days, and given us such deep hearts to enjoy them, above and beyond all thought, unless we were meant to be immortal.” You see, our real home is not here. We get little glimpses of heaven in sunsets, poetry, laughter, music, and love. These hints of a life lived full give us enough desire to keep us longing for more, unless of course we dismiss them and become used to the world we live in.

I’ve recently wondered where I should say I’m from…. Woodland? Redding? Michigan? Haiti? San Diego? What if we became so heaven oriented that our response was, “I’m from Paradise.”? We were not meant for a life full of sin and violence and heartbreak, only for a place more beautiful and grand than we can imagine. “But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.” Philippians 3: 20-21 (Also see Isaiah 65).
posted by Carsen @ 10:28 AM  
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"As for me, I am in your hands; do with me whatever you think is good and right." Jeremiah 26:14
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Name: Carsen
Home: California, United States
About Me: army wife, nurse, daughter, sister, Jesus-lover, and friend.
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