Well ladies and gents, after much prayer and anticipation my team for the next year has been divinely appointed and arranged. They are five of the most extraordinary women I have yet to meet this side of eternity. I am so excited to spend the next year loving and serving with them. After about ten minutes together we KNEW this was the team God had for each of us. How quickly we grew to love each other is pretty incredible. Somehow (God) I have been chosen as team leader. Our name is HOMEWARD BOUND. These ladies have already begun to rock my world on a daily basis with their heart for service and their obedient, listening ear for the Holy Spirit.
So a little background on our team name:
As a child I noticed a restlessness deep in my soul that I was never able to articulate or explain. Honestly, I thought maybe I was just crazy. It was especially strong after returning home from vacation or staying at a friend’s home. This trend continued… and I would often just feel weird when I got home from traveling (which I do quite a bit of). Typically it would take me a few days to return to a state of normalcy. At times, I would notice the feeling was more like homesickness. The strange part is, I could be sitting on my couch at home wedged between my parents and still be wrestling a mysterious yearning, a homesickness for a place I didn’t even know. I would generally try to numb this yearning, because honestly, it is uncomfortable. It made me feel like a looney tune. So I turned to friends, dance, food, alcohol, men, etc. to try to appease my yearning. But nothing seemed to work. It was still there gnawing at me.
I wasn’t exactly seeking to understand this feeling but I did start to pick up fragments of sermons, words from friends and snippets of scripture during my devotionals that would strike a nerve. One day I read the verse.
“He has also set eternity in the human heart…” Ecclesiastes 3:11.
And BAM it all made sense. I AM HOMESICK. But I am not homesick for anything I have ever known. I am homesick for my heavenly dwelling. I am yearning for the completion I will know when I stand face to face with my Creator. I am restless because this world is not my home. God has created my heart with a hole and a void that only He can fill.
The aching wasn’t going away because I was trying to fill an immortal longing with mortal stuff. The longing is there to point me to Jesus, to seek Him. But oh all the times I have failed Him by seeking my life elsewhere. Thank you Lord for revealing the secret of this mystery to me. The feeling still comes. Except now when it washes over me like a wave, I know where to turn. I run to God and ask Him to fill me.
So after I shared this story with my teammates we all just knew this was it. When we were asked a few hours later what our team name was we responded without hesitation “Homeward Bound.” It is there as a reminder that we are not created for this world. It is temporary but our souls and the work the Lord has called us to is eternal. It is a daily reminder that the World Race isn’t about what we can see in the present. But instead, it is about the eternal impact we will have. It is about celebrating the day we will stand before the throne of Jesus Christ, with the sex slave from Thailand to our right and the prisoner from Mozambique on our left, praising God for all time.
We are all on a journey Home to our Savior. We are Homeward Bound.
