mgpcpastor's blog

Prepared for our local paper, The Border Watch.

Sometimes the grass really is greener. Spending a week away in Sydney the grass is so lush and green everywhere. The trees throughout the suburbs are so large and foliage so dense. Watered by the abundant summer rain and encouraged by sunshine and humidity the plant life strives to fight back against the never ceasing encroachment of human dwellings and other places of activity.
The experience makes me look forward to home, and to a time when the grass under our feet will be thick and green, not brown and crunchy.
It also reminds me of the place where I grew up; the humidity, the brightness of the sun. But the differences in architecture and the multicultural array of faces on the streets brings me back to the here and now.
Thinking of home takes more than one form.
Home is a sense of place. The international flight touches down in the land of your birth and the attendant says ‘Welcome home.’ The town, suburb, or house where you spent the memorable years of growing up always evoke a sense of home, not matter how long you may spend away from them. Even decades later you can return to walk those streets and feel a strange sense of familiarity, though so much has changed.
Home is the people we love. With this sense of home it doesn’t matter where we are, as long as those who are family to us are there. If you’ve moved around you may have experienced this. After the international flight has landed, after you’ve been told you’re home, you walk through the exit door at customs and see the expectant waiting familiar faces of your loved ones. And then you feel at home.
There is a sense of home that is primarily a form of nostalgia. It expressed in fond memories of a time of life that is past. When our senses experience something that evokes those memories we feel a flood of security that we may not have even realised was absent in our lives.
There is a sense of home that is primarily expressed in expectation. The love we give and receive in family life both strengthens and nourishes us. We invest our love in others and become part of their sense of home. We receive the love of others and they become part of the fabric of our identity. Our present experiences bid us look forward with hope.
Home is where nostalgia and expectation intersect.
This is why our hearts are broken for the refugee.
That which is behind has to be escaped, without thought of return. That which is ahead is uncertain in terms of relationship; those to love and be loved by. All that can be hoped for is a future when place and the bonds of love will again be part of life.
Christians are called to identify with this experience.
In different ways throughout the Bible God bids his people seek their lasting security in him through Jesus. In doing so he calls on us to support those who have no earthly home. In affording the refugee a sense of place and partnership he grows our own understanding and expectation of a home that will last forever.