It’s that day again! Five minute Friday! Today’s prompt is:
Home.
Home sweet home.
Home is where the heart is.
There’s no place like home.
Those phrases evoke an image of Hollywood’s version of home. You know, ruby slippers, daddies holding baby girls up to christmas trees, farmhouses with the mom on the porch watching for the son to come home from the army…
All those things make us smile and the feelings of what home really means to us well up when we see those scenes.
But, isn’t home really the feelings and memories that surface when we think of “home”? It’s not the four walls and the ceiling. It’s what those walls and ceiling contain. The reality of home is truly in our hearts- the people laughing and talking around the table, the smells from the kitchen, the games played on rainy afternoons, the stories read late at night under the covers with a flashlight, the kittens and dogs and rabbits and birds and gerbels and hamsters, the flowers in the yard.
Or is it?
Is it not the knowledge that we are loved, that we will always be loved, that we are really not home yet, that what we think we know of home is really not home at all?
Hebrews 11:13 says this: All these people were still living by faith when they died. The did not receive the things promised, they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance. And they admitted that they were aliens and strangers on the earth.
We recognize that place that is home because our experiences here give us a taste of what home really is- there.
We are not home yet.