traveler.

November 6, 2010

Sometimes I have moments where I have an incredible, unquenchable longing for home.  But it’s a home I’ve never experienced before.  A place just beyond my comprehension, yet somehow I know it’s there.

It’s like an emptiness that I can’t quite fill.  And I feel it when the satisfaction I thought one thing or another might bring me seems far less significant, far less meaningful than I’d hoped.

“Home, then, is a powerful but elusive concept.  The strong feelings that surround it reveal some deep longing within us for a place that absolutely fits and suits us, where we can be, and perhaps find, our true selves.  Yet it seems that no real place or actual family satisfies these yearnings…We are all exiles, always longing for home.  We are always traveling, never arriving.”  -Timothy Keller, The Prodigal God

Always traveling, never arriving.  Seeing glimpses of glory, yearning for more.  Desperately seeeking but looking in all the wrong places.  Feels good, looks good, sounds good, but ultimately, if it’s not the Lord, I am empty.

“The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them…for they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”  -C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

Is all of this making sense?  Maybe not.  But I find comfort in God’s word that I am not alone.  That there were other hopeful travelers before me, who were so confident of this other, new and better home that they offered up their very lives for it.

“These all died in faith, not having recieved the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they werestrangers and exiles on the earth.  For people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland.  If they had been thinking of the land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return.  But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one.  Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city.”    -Hebrews 11:13-16