Home-thoughts From Before

I’ve been feeling lately like I’m living in a past that hasn’t happened yet. I look around and see people as if we are already separated, and I am looking back on them from half a country, or half a world, or half a lifetime away. And I am homesick.

I’ve known this kind of homesickness before: it happens every time I have to say goodbye to people I love, or when I breathe in a particularly beautiful sunset, or a symphony (Beethoven, not Mozart). When I see the fleetingness of life, and know there are moments I want to hold on to, but they will slip between my grasping fingers and I will never have them again. And then I weep, on the inside at least, as a child who has been hickory-sticked.

I miss my home.

Not the one where the wind comes sweepin’ down the plain (although I have always loved the perfection of the third syllable), and not the one where I am, and not the one where I will hopefully be soon. I have begun to realize how little I belong in any of these worlds, not because I don’t love them, but because I don’t belong in the world to which they belong: my citizenship is in Heaven.

And when I hear the laughter of people flying down a zipline over a retention pond, or smell the wavin’ wheat when the wind comes right behind the rain, I have to remember that these things are but a shadow, a copy of the reality that is to come. I love the Old Narnia so much because it reminds me of the New Narnia I haven’t seen yet.

And then I long for the time when I can say, as my grandmother did, “Oh, Jesus! It’s so beautiful!” When I can dwell in the house of my Father, the King yesterday, and today, and forever. When there will be no more parting, and He will wipe every tear from my eye. When His children do not give way to fights and quarrels among them. And we shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

“Oh, God, our Help in ages past,
Our Hope for years to come,
Our Shelter in the stormy blast,
And our eternal Home.”