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Homesick, this is a word I have heard and even experienced since college.  There have been times while away at school where I miss home and miss my family.  On the race I have talked with different team mates about it and we realize how blessed we are to be homesick.  If you are missing home it means that your family and home are good enough to miss.  You have something you long to go back to.  I am so incredibly blessed and I love my family.  One thing missing them has shown me is what it means to be homesick for Heaven.

A week or so ago I was reading about how we should long to be in Heaven and I realized that this is not always the case for me. I realized that all to often I don't let it sink in that my home is in heaven. Paul shows us this in his letter to the Philippians:
 
“But our citizenship is in heaven, and we eagerly await a Savior from there,
the Lord Jesus Christ” Philippians 3:20. 
 
We don’t belong to this earth, we are just visitors passing through. We are travelers emersing ourselves in the world to be "in the world but not of the world."
 

I am writing this in Rwanda, my 8th country since leaving home, and I am starting to learn what it looks like to be a visitor in a land that you don’t belong to.  I have been many places where I didn’t know the customs. Sometimes even once they were explained to me I didn’t understand why they were the way they were or thought they were just plain weird.  When you think about it, if this world is a foreign land then the customs and the norms should be weird to us. 

We need to shift our view of heaven from somewhere we would like to visit one day to the home we long to return to.  When we view heaven as a place we want to visit it is like seeing pictures and hearing stories of somewhere on the other side of the world and hoping that one day you will get to go there.  You can't miss something that you know nothing about.  A.W. Tozer writes in his book Born After Midnight,
 

“We all want to receive the hope of heaven as a kind of insurance against the day of death, but as long as we are healthy and comfortable, why change the familiar good for something about which we actually know very little.”

Instead of viewing heaven as somewhere we want to visit we should be looking at it as the place that we love, that has all the comforts of home, and where we long to be because that’s where our heart already is.  Most of us know so little about heaven because we know so little about God.  As I learn more about him and grow closer to him I begin to know what it feels like to want to be "home".
 
I don’t want to be so comfortable with this place that if I had the choice I would choose to stay.  I want to say "yes I will go with you" if Jesus asked me to leave this world behind.  I will do the job that God has called me to do, but I want to be focused on him.  I want to “EAGERLY await” Jesus’ return.

I have learned what homesickness is, even more so in the last few months.  Now I am learning that it can be a good thing.  Even more I am learning what it means to be homesick for heaven.  I am learning to embrace it and to accept it.  God has been good to me and is continuing to show me who he is and why I love him so.  Thank you for all your prayers and support you have given me and for answering God’s call and helping Him provide this opportunity for me to grow closer to him.  I love you all and God bless.

"The Lord may grant us many refreshing inns along the way, but never should we mistake them for home"
-C.S Lewis-