Third in a series on Eternity.
I love the last moments of sleep when snatches of a dream float in and out of my mind, a dream so sweet I want to hold on to it and relive it. I don’t want to ever wake up.
When God created us, He set eternity in our hearts. A longing for, or memory of, a deeper reality that we can’t see nags at us. We each carry Paradise around inside, and we yearn for it as the deer pants for water. Even if you love your life here, when you stop long enough to reflect, you’ve probably thought, “There has to be something more than this!”
We’re homesick for that other world.
Meanwhile, our bodies wear down; some of us seem to wear down more than others. Like a snowball rolling downhill, that process of decay picks up speed as we age. The physical tents we live in will not last. They are only temporary dwellings. At some subconscious level, our souls know this and they long to be released to their eternal home.
“For we know that if the earthly tent which is our house is torn down, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For indeed in this house we groan, longing to be clothed with our dwelling from heaven.” II Cor. 5:1-2
We groan. About that groan, Jean Fleming writes in The Homesick Heart:
“The groan isn’t to be released from a wheelchair or a bad marriage. The groan comes from the desire for completion, for culmination, for consummation. I’m weary and disgusted with being stifled in my humanity. I want to be set free from the vise that compresses me to a fraction of my intended height, that keeps me from reaching my full stature, that forces me to stumble and shuffle through life when I was meant to leap and bound. But most of all, I desire a newness that will allow me to enter fully into the Relationship I’ve begun on earth, to fully claim my family inheritance.”
The completion, culmination, consummation we desire is described as heaven:
“For this reason, they are before the throne of God; and they serve Him day and night in His temple; and He who sits on the throne shall spread His tabernacle over them. They shall hunger no more, neither thirst anymore; neither shall the sun beat down on them, nor any heat; for the Lamb in the center of the throne shall be their shepherd, and shall guide them to springs of the water of life; and God shall wipe every tear from their eyes.” Rev. 7:15-17
“And I heard a loud voice from the throne, saying, ‘Behold, the tabernacle of God is among men, and He shall dwell among them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself shall be among them, and He shall wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there shall no longer be any death; there shall no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away.’” Rev. 21:3-4
We are homesick. And one day, we’ll go home.