home away from home

I travel regularly to a couple of cities, and I stay in the same hotels every time. I would guess I’ve spent hundreds of nights in the Hampton Inn in Owasso, Oklahoma in the past few years. People call it my home away from home, but they’re wrong. Oh, I have a home away from home, but that’s not it.

My home away from home is my own body, as Paul explains in 2 Corinthians 6: “Therefore we are always confident and know that as long as we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord. For we live by faith, not by sight.” 

He explained this in the preceding five verses: “For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands. Meanwhile we groan, longing to be clothed instead with our heavenly dwelling, because when we are clothed, we will not be found naked. For while we are in this tent, we groan and are burdened, because we do not wish to be unclothed but to be clothed instead with our heavenly dwelling, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life.”

This isn’t my real home. I like to think of myself as a soldier, deployed forward for a peace-keeping and nation-building mission. The sooner I get it done, the sooner I get to go home.

The truth about deployed soldiers is they think of home all the time. They long to go there. They can’t wait for those precious moments talking to their family members back there. And that’s a great analogy for Christians. We too think longingly of our room in our Father’s mansion, and look forward eagerly to our regular chats in the meantime.

That’s how it should be, anyway. Unfortunately, too often we like it here. We don’t consider this a hardship tour; we’ve gone native. We’d like to stay when our tour is over, marry a nice local girl or guy and settle down with the people who really do live here.

It’s a thing we need to fight. Just as soldiers carry photos of their loved ones in their helmets, we should have reminders that we look at every day, things that connect us to our family and friends at home. 

We’re not home, we’re on assignment. Let’s be sure not to go AWOL.