I awoke to the quick jolting of my seat. I removed my earbuds as I overheard the pilot mumble words together that sounded something like “welcome to Quito” in Spanish. Exhausted as I was from the last seventy-two hours of traveling, I was able to get my belongings out of the empty airport and seat myself in a bus that would take me to my next “home” going into the final weeks of the mission. As I went in and out of consciousness swerving back and forth around the mountain valleys, I thought about what God had shown us all thus far in our journey. I had a very large feeling of expectancy about what we were going to get to go through. Over those coming weeks in Ecuador, I was refined, humbled, and challenged in ways I never imagined would come my way. And as I sit here at my “home” in Illinois, I’m still reflecting and processing how the Lord moved in so many ways at an exact point in time and continues to. I’m left with the knowledge that God’s wisdom is sometimes incomprehensible. Even when I can’t see the good in a situation and may be surrounded by darkness, I know my Father will never leave me nor forsake me. One piece of wisdom I’ve taken from this past journey is that God uses every tiny thing he puts you through to prepare you and refine you for the future. “Wherein ye greatly rejoice, though now for a season, if need be, ye are in heaviness through manifold temptations: That the trial of your faith, being much more precious than of gold that perisheth, though it is tried with fire, might be found unto praise and honor and glory at the appearing of Jesus Christ: Whom having not seen, ye love: in whom, though now ye see him not, yet believing, ye rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory: Receiving the end of your faith, even the salvation of your souls.” -1 Peter 1:5-9.
I want to talk about home. I also want to challenge you about what your idea of “home” is. The idea of home to me has been transformed quite a bit. You see, over the last year, my definition of home hasn’t made sense. Last summer my family was in the process of moving into a house that we’d been working on for two years. We had sold our original house and were living out of a temporary apartment as we were finishing our new home. Around two weeks before moving in, lightning struck our house and it was burnt to the ground in less than thirty minutes. I then left in September to go on this year-long mission across the world. My house ends up being a tent and some strangers’ living quarters in three countries I know nothing about. Don’t get me wrong, I love living out of a backpack, but I soon quickly had to understand what kept me founded and established in such foreign lands. I’m now at my new house in Illinois, a house I wasn’t living in when I left. It feels even more abnormal. Where is my home?
The one and the only reason I’m capable of doing such things is that my home is with me. It’s with me in the mountainous forests of Latin America. It’s with me out in the wide-open plains of Africa. It’s with me on the bus as I’m swerving through the dark valleys on the top of the world. But it’s even with me here on my bed. It’s not my physical house, it’s not my family, it’s not the community I had on the race, and it’s not my fight through being in these places or being with these people. It’s my Savior, my Father, my Creator, my Comforter, my Helper. It’s Jesus, It’s Christ, the Lord God Almighty. He makes His home in me and my home in Him. That’s where my home is. It’s a house that can take the blows of lightning and fire, but stand firm. It can be surrounded by darkness on all sides, yet full of light. It can take being lost across the world, yet found close. And it can take on death itself, yet swallowed up by life and life abundantly. His name is Jesus. He outstretches His hand your way, will you take hold?
So I’m back for now, in the town I grew up in. A place so familiar yet so distant. It’s not my home. Nor is it my resting place. But it is a place of love, both for me to receive and a place to give away. Churches, friends, family, and acquaintances are all around to connect and catch up with. And I’m grateful for every single person that I can see. I just hope to see the day when your home is in the right place. A place that cannot be moved, but goes from glory to glory. “Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord.” -2nd Corinthians 3:17-18.
