Heart Tracks - Home 12/3/13

      One of the aspects of growing older is how much time one can spend reflecting on what has been in their life.  As I reflect upon mine, I have come to realize how much time I have spent looking for "home."  I didn't grow up in a "horrible" family, but through my teenage years and early 20's, I came to spend far more time in my friends homes than I did my own.  For whatever reason, my home just didn't feel like "home."  In my early 20's I began a journey that found me living at many different addresses, yet none of them were home.  There always seemed to be something missing, though I didn't know what it was.  I didn't realize that I was, as Anne Graham Lotz puts it, "homesick for God."  Then, at the age of 29, Jesus Christ captured my life.  I had found my home, or at least, I thought I had.  I had yet to realize how inwardly empty I still was.  It's said that each of has an empty area in our soul that only Christ can fill, and that's true, but I have come to see that He can only fill it when we become aware of how vast and deep it is, and how desperately He is needed there.  Even with Him, I had not yet found that out.  That would not begin to happen for another 10 years.

    With the collapse of my marriage, among the many devastations I experienced was the feeling that I had lost my home, a home that was far more than a house.  I felt that the security and well-being I had known was lost, and because of that, I had a sense of lostness as well.  The next 20 years would find me changing my address 22 times.  I lived in many places, none of them were home.  Then, in 2008, the Father worked in truly miraculous ways that enabled me to do something I had not thought possible, actually purchase a house.  That house has become my home, at least in the earthly sense, and my gratitude to Him goes beyond words that I can express.  Still, a greater miracle than that has taken place.  Though I knew Christ, followed and loved Him, there remained in me a kind of dull ache, an ache that I thought could be remedied through the rebuilding of that "home" I had lost so many years before.  If I could find the right person to share this new home with me, than life would be complete.  So many make this same mistake, thinking that home is all about marriage, family, and the well-being that can come with them, so we spend our lives looking for that right person to help us make that a reality.  That person doesn't exist, because no person has been created that can fill that void that all of us come into this world with.  That longing for Him, that "homesickness for God." 
     Psalm 90:1 reads, Lord, through all the generations You have been our home.  It was not the promised land of Israel.  It wasn't the abundance of fruit and life that He blessed them with there, it was Himself.  He was their home, and without Him, no place could really be home, for they, we, are created with the purpose of finding our home, our lives, in Him.  In Acts 5:42, the apostles, preaching to the Jews in the Temple said, The Messiah you are looking for is Jesus.  He speaks the same to you and I.  The Messiah, the Answer, the Hope, the Life, the Home, you have been searching for, is Jesus.  I have known Him now for more than 30 years, but it has been in the last 5 that I have truly discovered that it is He, and He alone who is my home.  Marriage, family, houses, these are wonderful blessings, but blessings that can be lost to us in a moment.  He is the home that will remain.  Our outward "address" may change again and again, but He is the constant, He is the One that, no matter where we may be, is home.  Our home.
    In this season of thankfulness, I can't express the gratitude I feel to Him, who is, has been, and always will be, my home.  Have you truly discovered that yet, or do you continue to seek to find that security in an "address", be it person, family, occupation, or ministry?  You'll look in vain to those places, for the One you seek, you look for, is Jesus.  There may be aspects of life we are missing, but if we are missing Him, beloved, we are missing everything.

Blessings,
Pastor O