Elyse Fitzpatrick - Home: How Heaven & the New Earth Satisfy Our Deepest Longings

Have you ever been camping? I dont know how much you appreciate the outdoor activity, but Ive always thought that one of the fundamental purposes of camping is to make you long for home.

If youve been camping, you know what its like. It all starts with giving in to the romantic notion of wilderness living with your friends and family in the great outdoors. You have visions of sleeping under the stars and cooking over an open fire. You pack up, filled with the positive vibes of adventure, and travel to what you think will be the ideal site to experience your camping dream. You set up your tent and collect firewood, and with feelings of pioneer accomplishment, you prepare that first meal over the campfire. Food tastes different when its been cooked over an open flame. (Is that ash?)

By the third day, your back hurts from sleeping on an air mattress that slowly deflates, your tent has taken on smells that seem subhuman, and all the available dry wood within a half-mile radius has been used. At this point, something begins to happen inside of you: You begin to think about home. But you still have hope for the rest of the trip. That is, until you go to the cooler and find your special roastthe one you knew would just wow your familyis now a sickly gray color, floating in stomach-turning bloody water.

Its happened: Youre hit with a deep longing for homethe comfort of a soft mattress, the ease of a stove where you turn a knob and get an instant flame, and the convenience of a refrigerator that does such an amazing job of keeping food cool and fresh. You long for the sights, sounds, smells, and luxuries that only home can provide, and you begin to listen for comments from friends and family about being homesick so you can say, Hey, lets just pack up and go home.

But, if you decide to go camping in a sixty-foot Winnebago with a fifty-inch flat-screen TV, high-speed Internet, the kitchen of Gordon Ramsay, and beds from the Ritz-Carlton, you probably wont be homesick, and you wont be as grateful for your home. Why? Because youve done everything in your power to make camping just as good as, or better than, your actual home.

Perhaps one of the reasons why God chooses to leave us in this terribly broken world with its various disappointments is to create in our souls a certain dissatisfaction, an insatiable hunger for home. In his sovereign plan, this world is not meant to be our final destination; were not meant to live with a right-here, right-now mentality, where we expend our physical, emotional, spiritual, financial, and relational energies trying to turn this temporal home into the eternal home it will never be.

We try to numb our homesickness with an endless cycle of remodeling, hoping that each renovation we make will get us closer to satisfying our longing for home. We jump from house to house, from job to job, from church to church, from accomplishment to accomplishment, from marriage to marriage, hoping the next move will give us what we long for. But we only become more distracted, more cynical, more discouraged, and more fearful because nowhere weve been and nothing weve done can turn this brokenness into the home we long for. The trying will simply make you crazy.

But theres another dynamic operating here. Allow me to refer back to my camping illustration. Imagine getting to the point where you recognize that camping is not as wonderful as its cracked up to be, but you have no clear idea of what home is like. Now youre stuck between what youve found to be disappointing and what you dont really understand. What I have described is not a pleasant place to be, but Im convinced its where many Christians find themselves.

Its nearly impossible to be homesick for a place that you have little or no real understanding about. When youre away from home, you long for home because you know whats there. You recall the welcoming smells, the warmth of the family room, where you can kick back and not be disturbed, the dinner table that always seems to deliver familiar and comforting meals, your bedroom that is yours alone or that you lovingly share, the backyard that carries the memories of many childhood adventures. But more than anything else, you long for home because of the people that are therepeople who love you and accept you as you are. I am aware that some of you sadly do not have this experience of home.

You see, were all homesick, but many of us dont know were homesick because were too busy giving ourselves to the impossible task of turning where we are into home, and many more of us dont know were homesick because we simply dont know what home is like. Whether we know it or not, we long for home:

Every sad moment in marriage is a longing for home.

Every moment of hurt and concern as a parent is a longing for home.

Every cry in the midst of loneliness is a longing for home.

Every complaint in a moment of physical pain is a longing for home.

Every loss of physical or mental vitality is a longing for home.

Every frustration with corrupt government is a longing for home.

Every urban fear in the dark of night is a longing for home.

Every if only that interrupts our sleep is a longing for home.

Every loss of a friend or family member is a longing for home.

Every discouragement at the loss of a job is a longing for home.

Every sadness at the failure of a pastor is a longing for home.