There is No Home Here on Earth For Me 03/08/2024

Home what does it mean? This is a military town where many in our community are not from here. Many have left their parents home and the place they grew up for the first time in their lives. So the idea of home may be hard to fathom. Is it the place they grew up? I know when I went home for the first time after bootcamp my hometown did not feel like home. The people I grew up with and went to school with all seemed foreign to me. I had changed a great deal in bootcamp. Every year when I came back I had changed so much that I grew more and more distant from the place I knew as home that it merely became a place I visited. Eventually I moved back to Michigan and the place started to become more like home again. When I moved back down here Jacksonville had changed a lot. There is now a highway running through it and different accesses to base, and so many new stores and restaurants it was kind of hard to find it as home. I am starting to get used to it again but realize in all of this here on earth I really do not have a home. I am just passing through, I am a pilgrim in a strange land that is constantly changing and will never have a place here I feel fully at home.

There is one place I do have a home. That place is being prepared for me by Jesus as he promised would happen in John 14:2-3 On days when I feel lost I remember these words and know that I am only passing through. One day he will return for me and take me to my fathers house where I will finally be home. It won’t matter if you were the black sheep of the family, or the outcast in society. Jesus came to lift up those society discarded. One day when we cross that river and enter the gates of the New Jerusalem I believe walking down those streets will be a lot of the people the religious looked down upon. The ones who were looked down upon will be there because they looked up to Jesus and cried out to him accepting him as their lord and savior.