This World Is Not My Home

I can’t help but say ‘amen’ to this passage by Joni Tada in her book, Heaven, as she shares her thoughts during a trip to the LA airport:

With eyes of faith I looked beyond the sight of bumper-to-bumper traffic, the smell of sweat, cigarettes, exhaust fumes, and the sounds of my harried co-travelers, and began humming quietly...

This world is not my home, I'm just a passing through,
My treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue,
The angels beckon me from heaven's open door,
And I can't feel at home in this world anymore.

For me, it was a moment of faith. Faith merely the size of a grain of mustard seed. Remember, that's all it takes to be sure of things hoped for - future divine fulfillments - and certain of things you do not see, that is, unseen divine realities.

Of what was I so sure and certain? Here, let me sing it again: "The angels beckon me from heaven’s open door, / And I can’t feel at home in this world anymore."

I hum that haunting tune in other places besides the Los Angeles airport. Sometimes I get that "can't feel at home" sensation ambling down the aisles of K-Mart, watching women grab for the blue-light specials. Sometimes it happens sitting with Ken watching Monday Night Football’s fourth instant replay of a team’s third-down conversion. And I definitely feel "this world is not my home" as I sit on the Ventura-Freeway-turned-parking-lot.

Don’t think I’m strange. Christians have felt the same for centuries. Malcolm Muggeridge, a British journalist who spent most of his years battling Christianity, finally succumbed to Christ in his seventies. The intellectual world had always been home to him, but now, in the hallowed halls of university life, he found himself saying,

I had a sense, sometimes enormously vivid, that I was a stranger in a strange land; a visitor, not a native…a displaced person.... The feeling, I was surprised to find, gave me a great sense of satisfaction, almost of ecstasy.... Days or weeks or months might pass. Would it ever return - the lostness? I strain my ears to hear it, like distant music; my eyes to see it, a very bright light far away. Has it gone forever? And then - ah! the relief. Like slipping away from a sleeping embrace, silently shutting the door behind one, tiptoeing off in the grey light of dawn - a stranger again. The only ultimate disaster that can befall us, I have come to realize, is to feel ourselves to be at home here on earth. As long as we are aliens, we cannot forget our true homeland. (Muggeridge, Jesus Rediscovered, 47-48)

(Joni Eareckson Tada, Heaven, 96-97)

Oh how there is more to life than what is seen. Although I am filled with such awe at the sky as the sun is setting, or the smile on the face of someone I love, there’s just something about the unseen realities to which they are pointing - love, hope, trust - things that are eternal - that is so beautiful...and oh how Jesus is the most beautiful of all.

“So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” 2 Corinthians 4:18

Come quickly, Jesus. Amen.