Have you ever been homesick? That awful feeling in the pit of your stomach. That longing for a familiar place where you just belong?

I had to stop by her house today to retrieve some items she asked me to bring her. I thought I could do it without crying, but I couldn’t. She should still be there. She should have been able to stay until He took her home to paradise and I am so disappointed in that. Everywhere I turn, I see her there. Cooking in her kitchen, getting dressed in her bedroom, fixing her hair in her bathroom, watching her television in her living room, playing cards with her friends at her dining room table.

But it wasn’t to be. These bodies fail us, eventually. Sometimes we have to move on to places of someone else’s choosing so that we can be cared for when we can no longer care for ourselves. All of this may be my future and I certainly wouldn’t want anyone crying about it. So I wipe my eyes and head out. Locking the door behind me and loading her reminders of home in my car to deliver to her now “home.”

She greets me with a smile and I realize that she seems to be having a really good day today. She wants me to meet a neighbor down her hallway and she tells me that a church group came to sing today and she enjoyed it. I still want to cry.

Does it ever “get” you this way? When you witness someone being so brave and accepting, which is how you would hope they would be, and it makes you sad. Because you wish it didn’t have to be this way.

God knows and understands. Can you even imagine how hard it was for Him to send us His Son? To take Him from the paradise of Heaven and have Him take on flesh and be fully human while still being fully God? To have to feel what we feel and worse?

 

I know that the circumstances I just described could be so much worse, but still, they hurt. I am reminded that no matter how “wonderful” things are here in our own little worlds, they will never satisfy the ache in our hearts for our forever home.

“Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid, you believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many mansions, if it were not so, I would have told you, I go to prepare a place for you and if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you unto myself that where I am there you may be also.” John 14:1-3

Little farther on in John 14:27, Jesus says:

“Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you, not as the world gives, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.”

Could it be this dear lady has peace about where she is and what she is doing because it is the kind the world cannot give? I am sure this is so. And His peace will comfort the ache in my heart also, when things are not the way I wish they would be. And maybe every now and then I need to be reminded that the disappointments that we direct at God, should only be to handed over to Him for healing.

If Jesus could endure His cross, looking at the joy that was set before Him, (Hebrews 12:2), I can choose to see what hurts in this life as an endurance test and look forward to the next. There is nothing, no thing, that can separate us from the love of God, (Romans 8:38-39), and isn’t the love of God the only thing that matters? This is the joy, His love that never ends. His love that leads us home.