Three Competing Realities; One Highest Home

Home: hopeful, inspiring, intriguing. Too often our encounters with it or failure to enter it result in improper results. Circumstances in which we feel completely at peace and fully appreciated can be idolized, when in reality they only point to a reality more full and real. Circumstances that offer us only chaos can be utterly angering and frustrating, when this fallen world should only leave us discontent with what is and working for what could be.

Hebrews 11 offers concise stories of people who modeled faith, and in the middle of the list, the author interjects this commonality: "All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance. And they admitted that they were aliens and strangers on earth. People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. Instead, they were longing for a better country - a heavenly one. Therefore, God is not ashamed to be called their God, for He has prepared a city for them" (vv. 13-16).

Philippians 3 offers encouragement to leave the past behind and endure the obstacles before us because "our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from tehre, the Lord Jesus Christ" (v. 20). Jesus was able to "endure the cross, scorning its shame" because of "the joy set before Him" (Hebrews 12:2), and an important part of the joy He left before His disciples is that "in [His] Father's house there are many rooms.... [He went] there to prepare a place for [us],
[and He will] come back and take [us] to be with [Him] that [we] also may be where [He] is" (John 14:2-3). Home is with Him.

For all of the excitement I gain from pondering dwelling in His house, in fellowship with Him, the home for which I was designed, I certainly struggle to apply these passages well. I'm too often given to forgetting the primary place of my citizenship and fail to represent its counterculturalness and Truth. Or I beg for the fulfillment of my heavenly citizenship in an attempt to escape the frustrating fallenness of every aspect of this world.

I feel like I've done my time in American academia: I've completed more than enough courses to graduate from college with a very respectable GPA, supposedly ready for work and life. This makes it somewhat difficult to endure additional months of classes. But, thankfully, God challenged me today with giving up the desire to move on and escape, not by accepting things as right and good, but in adopting the desire to understand and redeem.

Students are right in being discontent with the educational system in America (and probably in other places, too, but I can only speak for here): Christians are familiar with living life in view of eternity, essentially according to a higher Reality. It's from this standpoint that decisions about this world can and should be made. Those who deny the existence of a spiritual reality base their lives on the current, tangible one: what can I do to make the best of life on earth? A tragic trend that has become apparent to me is a retreat from even the earthly reality, which can be admittedly difficult and painful, in favor of a virtual one. And it's in this space where people can enjoy fulfilling fantastic dreams and achieving unimaginable success: we can become a level 52 warlord in World of Warcraft and smite even the strongest foes; we can solve all of a business' problems with a few taps on a calculator; we can reduce the functions of the brain to a memorable thirty pages in a textbook.

I don't long for the destruction of all computer games or the ceasing of all schools. I don't want to knock my teeth out with a hammer in frustration or just escape to heaven. May knowing and looking forward to our heavenly home be both a source of ideas for redeeming society's struggles and a stronghold of hope for us to endure whatever life throws at us, knowing that the Lord joyfully paid a price for us to join Him, and He's not going to exchange us for anything.