There's No Place Like Home

Nine years ago, I packed up my life into the Santa Fe and moved cross-country to a kitschy environmental organization which shall remain nameless. Whatever did not make the trip East remained in the family storage unit – couch, end tables, bed, etc. until I returned home from fulfilling my one-year contract. While it is largely true that I have lived (mostly) away from home since age eighteen, I still felt homesick.

Whenever I got homesick, guess where I wanted to go?

Wal-Mart.

For a native Arkansan who worked for the retail giant through college, Wal-Mart was the place I could walk around and feel like I was back home. Most of the stores in the Northeast, including the Torrington location I used to frequent, are still Discount City models. Supercenters were far and few in between, and I wasn’t exactly getting catfish for a good price.

This may resonate with some of us who have been pilgrims in a dangerous land, not knowing a solitary soul for hundreds of miles as we try to rediscover tinges of our familiar lives with us.

Jesus illustrates this principle when He uses the parable about the one sheep missing from the flock of one hundred and its subsequent rescue in Matthew 18:11-13 below:

11 For the Son of man is come to save that which was lost

12 How think ye? If a man have an hundred sheep, and one of them be gone astray, doth he not leave the ninety and nine, and goeth into the mountains, and seeketh that which is gone astray?

13 And if so be that he find it, verily I say unto you, he rejoiceth more of that sheep, than of the ninety and nine which went not astray.

As people, we tend to not concern ourselves with the one sheep when the other ninety-nine are right here with us, obediently moving from place to place. The shepherd points out that when the one sheep was missing, he searched high and low, through thick and thin, brambles, bushes, and broken branches all in the name of finding it. Because he was equally accountable for the one as well as the ninety-nine, the shepherd kept looking for it. Eventually, he and the sheep were reunited and he was overjoyed not because of the ninety-nine that stayed loyal but instead of the one finding its way home to complete the flock.

Today, I rest in the solace of knowing home is wherever God is. I do not have to click my heels three times like Dorothy to be instantly transported to Springhill Manor (I don’t own any red shoes that would get me there), nor do I have to make the 45-minute drive to Friendship in order to find a place which I belong. Home is Heaven; all of our earthly destinations are temporal until the day we return to see God in His divine glory.