Heart Tracks - Home

"Lord through all the generations you have been our home." Psalm 90:1...."People who seek for some way to deaden their pain never discover their deep yearning for Him. They live for relief and become addicts to whatever provides it." Larry Crabb

I happened upon an episode of the 1970's series The Waltons last night. I immediately sensed a heartwarming as I watched. The same kind of heartwarming I felt more than 40 years ago when it was network series. Most especially in relation to my time as a college student in a small northwestern college in Pennsylvania.

I was living, along with a collection of friends, in a place called The Edinboro Hotel. We had rooms above the only bar in a college town. We were quite a gathering of characters, with names like Shark, Monkee, Nutso, and the Duck. We were rowdy. So much so that on a Saturday night, when the bar below us was wall to wall with weekend partiers, they often had to come upstairs to ask us to keep it down while we were in the midst of our own "celebrations." Yet in the midst of this lifestyle, there was something that I thought little of then, but do quite often now. Each week, when a new episode of The Waltons came on, that collection of souls would gather to watch. A group of longhaired guys, very much a reflection of the culture they were a part of, came together to watch a show about a loving, church going country family, that in the midst of the Great Depression, were bound together in that love. I never considered it then, but I do now. Why did we faithfully watch a show that seemed to be completely alien to how we lived? I think I know now. It gave a picture of home. A home most of us didn't know. It spoke to a longing within the hearts of each of us. The desire to truly be home.

We are born into a fallen world. A world that bears no resemblance to what the Father created it to be. Just as we bear no resemblance to what He created us to be. We too are fallen, lost in our sin. Yet within the hearts of each of us is a longing for the "home" we have lost, and a yearning to get back to it. We have found many means to try and "medicate" those longings by counterfeit means; drugs, alcohol, sex, relationships, the drive to succeed, achieve, and accumulate. Yet none are anything more than temporary fixes. They can't satisfy that longing. Only One can. The One who calls Himself our Home. The One who is our Home. The Home we were created for.

I wandered through those 1970's in a kind of foggy daze. I longed for that home and tried so many of the above means to find it, but I never did. As I approached the end of that decade, I had run out of ways to try and find it. I felt further away from home than ever. Then, through a series of events and people, Jesus Christ came and rescued me. Jesus, who told us that He is the Way, the Truth and the Life, showed that He was all of that and more. He was the way home. The only way. In Him, I found what my heart had longed for so deeply. Through Him, I found my home in the heart of the Father. I have lived there ever since. Jesus showed me the way home and then took me there.

Does this longing exist in you? Are you ready to abandon all the other "ways" you've been looking to, and discover the One who has always been, will always be, the way home? That longing you have was placed there by Him. He alone can satisfy it. He alone will get you home. In the book of Ruth, Naomi, a Jewess living in Moab as an alien, along with her daugher-in-law Ruth, "took the road that led home." That road, in Christ, lies before you. Will you take it....all the way home?

Blessings,
Pastor O