“When I think of home, I think of a place Where there’s love overflowing I wish I were home, I wish I was back there With the things I’ve been knowin’…”
So begins the lyrics to the song “Home” from The Wiz. (Listen here.) Recently everyone from Phillip Phillips to Michael Bublé have recorded songs with the same title. Poets and songwriters have written hundreds of songs lamenting being away from home.
Home means so many things. To me, growing up in my parent’s home meant warmth and love and discipline. Character was taught and beliefs were in the center. We did have troubles, but as long as we had each other to lean on, they soon passed by.
Mom is longing for home these days and tells us that she’s ready to go home. I never know if she’s looking back in time to her childhood home or one of the many homes she made with Daddy on their travels around the world. Perhaps she’s looking for the home where she now resides and just doesn’t recognize it. Maybe she’s longing for her new home, her forever home. Many people long for their forever home because this crazy world feels less and less like home.
I think I’m missing too many people who have already gone to their forever home. There is a poem that speaks of people who have sailed beyond sight. It’s one of my favorites, written by the Presbyterian minister Henry Van Dyke.
I am standing upon the seashore. A ship, at my side, spreads her white sails to the moving breeze and starts for the blue ocean. She is an object of beauty and strength. I stand and watch her until, at length, she hangs like a speck of white cloud just where the sea and sky come to mingle with each other.
Then, someone at my side says, “There, she is gone.”
Gone where?
Gone from my sight. That is all. She is just as large in mast, hull and spar as she was when she left my side. And, she is just as able to bear her load of living freight to her destined port.
Her diminished size is in me — not in her.
And, just at the moment when someone says, “There, she is gone,” there are other eyes watching her coming, and other voices ready to take up the glad shout, “Here she comes!”
And that is dying…
So is heaven the home Mom’s referencing? In scripture, Jesus promised to prepare a home for us. As a believer, Sunday school teacher, and Bible Study leader, I’m certain Mom has a very clear idea of her ultimate home. She made certain each of her children knew where their ultimate home was, too.
Today when I asked Mom where her home was she said, “Route 3, Fayetteville, North Carolina.” She asked me where my home was and I said, “Clarkesville, Georgia.” She said she had been there and liked it and she volunteered that Clarkesville had been her home for once upon a time.
Each day home is different. Some days are easy because she is home in the house she and Daddy built here in 1977. Other days she’s “visiting” my house and she is ready to leave. Some days she’s in a facility and really ready to go. Our goal is to keep her in her house, her home, until she sails away to heaven’s shore.
Until she goes to her forever home.
