Far From Home

I have been "far from home" for a long time. When I started this blog I named it Beck Far From Home for two reasons. The most obvious being that Wyoming, where I lived at the time, was a significant distance from my Georgia roots. 

Living in a land wildly different from what I knew, longing for the familiar, highlighted the second reason for my homesickness. The longing was just a reminder that Home is a deeper truth my heart is searching for. My heart agrees with the psalmist cry, "Lord, through all the generations you have been our home!" (Psalm 10) I live in eager anticipation for the day my body will experience the reality my heart already knows, where Jesus is there is my home.

Lately a new homesickness has surfaced. My heart has taken flight and wanders outside of itself longing to be with those Jesus loves. What could compel a journey far from home to be with a people who are not my own? Only the grand love of the Father. What compels me to walk out the doors of my house into the messy life of a neighbor? Only Jesus grace.

My imagination is being caught up in the wonder of what God has planned for a nation. My heart is captured, becoming a co-conspirator, by his love for a needy little boy just across the street. God's deep desire to reconcile all mankind to himself compels me, and has set a new kind of homesickness in my heart. I have a new awareness of being far from home. I long to be where Jesus is. I hear him calling from an ancient land, from the halls of people institutionalized in their suffering. And he's calling in the voice of a tongue tied preschooler, with speech so broken it makes me wince. "Love sees, love goes, and love is present."

I choose to see the neighbor, the needy foreigner; I choose to move toward them in their pain and loneliness; I choose to sit with them in their need being the ears that listen, the hands that sooth, the shoulder that gives rest. I wonder how much I'm really blessing though because truly I'm the one being blessed. I didn't know it was possible to love a child that isn't your own so fiercely. That surprise can only be due to the years I've spent loving like a legalist and not like a Servant. I choose love only because Love chose me. 

My heart hears it's Love call and leaves home but I'm learning, that in a sense, it's impossible to leave my home because it's always been Jesus.