Home … Here but not quite.
In the spring of 2009, Danielle and I were living in Highland Park, IL (north burbs of Chicago) while she finished up her graduate work and I served in ministry part-time and worked full-time at a bicycle shop. That spring a pastor friend from Pittsburgh came to visit while he attended a theological symposium at Trinity. Over a long evening of catching up he eventually floated an idea our way. The church he pastored (it was the church Danielle and I attended in late middle and through high school) was ready to add a staff member and he wanted me to consider the position. It was a bi-vocational student ministry director role. Initially, Danielle and I were honored but said we really weren’t sure what God had next for us and we had commitments keeping us in Illinois through the early fall at the minimum. He then asked us just to pray about it. Long story short, we prayed, sought Godly counsel, and eventually accepted the role.
By the time we finished up our commitments in IL and moved back to PA almost seven months had gone by. We quickly settled into a house, found additional work since my ministry role was very bi-vocational at 15 hours a week, and began connecting in community. Danielle and I had landed back in a place that we never thought we would move back to. In fact, our house was even in the borough that I grew up in. Danielle’s dad was a three-block walk north and my grandma was a four block walk south. Everything in so many ways felt familiar. Yet, we had just spent the better part of six years away. For Danielle, part of those away years were spent in Philadelphia then Chicago. And for me all six in the Chicago-land area. PA initially felt like it had not changed at all, but we quickly realized that we had changed. Our time away impacted us. Then, over the first year of life and ministry in PA, we started noticing that home really wasn’t the same as when we initially left. We had changed and it had changed.
Home was here… but not quite.
In other words, home didn’t quite feel like home anymore. As I read the book of Nehemiah, I imagine that is how those living in Jerusalem felt and especially those who would return to live in Jerusalem would feel. There was something exciting about the restoration of the walls, the city, the people, and especially the Temple. But, there was no mistaking it, they all had been changed by the years of exile under the Assyrians, Babylonians, and now the Persians. Yes, they had more freedom under Persia, but they weren’t free or fully autonomous. Nor will they really ever be again. They were exiles trying to make home feel like home again. That was no easy task as they would face external and internal opposition.
Home will never truly feel like home for them again. In some ways, they will be stuck in a pattern of rediscovering it. What will keep them moving forward is a hopeful vision for something better.
Today, as Christians we should walk in the same tension, we are exiles in our homelands. Peter will remind us of this truth (1 Pet. 2:11). We are also to look forward to something better, the age to come and the new heaven and new earth (Rev. 21). C.S. Lewis in his beloved series, The Chronicles of Narnia, gives us a glimpse of what our experience will be on the new earth. He writes,
“And the sea in the mirror, or the valley in the mirror, were in one sense just the same as the real ones: yet at the same time they were somehow different — deeper, more wonderful, more like places in a story: in a story you have never heard but very much want to know. The difference between the old Narnia and the new Narnia was like that. The new one was a deeper country: every rock and flower and blade of grass looked as if it meant more. I can’t describe it any better than that: if ever you get there you will know what I mean.
It was the Unicorn who summed up what everyone was feeling. He stamped his right fore-hoof on the ground and neighed, and then he cried, I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now. The reason why we loved the old Narnia is that is sometimes looked a little like this. Come further up, come further in!”[1]
Let us look forward in faith and with hope for our home that is to come even while we walk in the tension of being exiles in this current place. There is something better ahead that we experience in part now and will experience in full then.
[1] C.S. Lewis, The Last Battle, HarperTrophy, 2000, pp. 195-197.