You Have Been our Home

You Have Been our Home

"Our Lord, in all generations you have been our home.” Psalm 90:1

During my late elementary school years, and into junior high, my family lived in Alhambra, CA, part of the East Los Angeles suburbs. In a lower middle class neighborhood, clapboard houses were the books and apartment buildings the bookends of each block. It was a great place to grow up, with a peculiar mix of Caucasian and Latino families. Our school was just up the block with its asphalt playground and covered lunch area. Around the block we spent our dimes and quarters on candy at the drug store and sodas at the little hamburger shack.

As you move north from Alhambra you move into ever-increasing areas of wealth. First you encounter South Pasadena, then Pasadena where the Tournament of Roses Parade is held each New Year’s Day. Then, at the foothills of the Angeles National Forest, La Canada, Altadena, and Sierra Madre boast their mansions with long, winding drives behind imposing iron gates.

Since dad was pastor at a church in Pasadena, many of our Sunday afternoon drives were spent gazing at the mansions hugging the hillsides. My siblings and I would stare open-mouthed and speculate at what wonders were inside those houses larger than a city block. Did butlers answer the door-bell sounded by pulling a long tasseled cord? Did maids clean the rooms, arrange the meals and tend to the needs of the owners within?

Christmas was our favorite time to go mansion-viewing. The people of the foothills probably spent more than my dad’s annual ministerial salary to light up their homes for the celebration. Animated spaceships with reindeer circling below graced one of our favorite displays. It would sit upon its multi-colored launch pad and then rise some twenty feet in the sky with even more lights flaring underneath as its contrail. For all our gazing, we never found our way inside one of those mansions. We did know that one of them had a shower with sixteen separate nozzles!

Whether we dream of palatial mansion or a simple cabin, all of us want to feel at home. We want a place where it is ok to take off our shoes, sit in our undershirt, drink out of the milk carton, and wrestle with the dog on the kitchen floor. We long for acceptance and safety, for a place of refuge and hope. Whether it is around a Thanksgiving table set for 35 or a retired couple sharing coffee on the deck, we long for some indefinable called “home”.

Father God created the earth for animals to inhabit, the sea for fishes, and the air for birds; but it is in the Lord Himself that humankind finds a home. It is only through Christ that we know we are always “at home”. Jesus told His disciples that He no longer called them “servants”, because a master doesn’t tell servants about the inner workings of the household. He said, “I call you friends”. He has opened the gate to the mansion of our soul. Jesus has invited us in to the richest living experience we can even imagine. The sorrow of it all is that so many times we reach out somewhere else for the contentment He provides.

So many seem to beg God's help in prayer, and wonder if He will protect them. It is because they only seek Him in a storm, when all others measures have failed them, they finally call out for His refuge! But that is not what God offers. A follower of Jesus must maintain constant communication with God, must dwell in God, and not run to him now and then.

Dear ones, we do not even dwell in the “temple” or the “sanctuary”; God Himself is our dwelling place! The perfect job will never heal the ache for fulfillment. The perfect relationship is only a temporary solution to the lonesome cry of our heart for God.

Go to the ancient kingdoms. Visit Rome and see how the halls of Caesar are not rubble. Look at their playground, “The Coliseum”, now a haunt for birds and reptiles. Their announcements of an everlasting kingdom no longer echo from the box where Nero once ruled his judgments.

But then, just a couple hundred miles to the east, visit the quiet Garden where Jesus wept for the burden He would bear. Find the tomb, where once His body was laid upon the cold stone. It is empty, He is alive! Rome, and all other political structures promised what they could never fill. But Jesus says, “He who lives in me, and I in him, that person will bear much fruit.” Today, trust the Lord who is your rightful dwelling place; and, from this day forward, enjoy the warmth of home.