Tag: heaven

Home Isn’t A Place

Touching down in the middle of a corn field is kind of peculiar sight, but if your in Iowa…it’s normal.

Home. I felt my heart ease into a strange rhythm of familiarity. So strange how easy it is go back to “normal” after being away for so many months and literally having been out of the country and back.

Home isn’t a place, it’s where your heart is tide too. My family. My friends. They are pieces of my heart running around. Now that my two best friends no longer live in Iowa, it’s more sad to go back, but my family is still there.

Iowa is just full of corn, but if you lived here your entire life you would find more to do than just starring at a cornfield across the road from your house. People who ask me what ones does in Iowa; I wouldn’t know. If your used to being bored, you find ways to entertain yourself.

My friends and I  jokingly dubbed ourselves the Queens of our small town…little did we know that a year later, neither of us would be around to reign over our metaphorical subjects.

As heartbreaking as it may seem…there is a happiness about it. A happiness that we can say later on in life as we all have careers and six digit salaries “remember when we all were poor and worked at the Cheese House together that entire summer?” or “Remember the late night runs to Village Inn?” and all the other crazy road trips and laughing until we couldn’t breathe.

I miss those days.

I don’t want to relive my life though. It would be nice to stop in once in a while. It would be nice to meet up at the corner near my house to drive into the city. It would be nice to get up early for church and eat at our favorite diner. It would be nice some days to hear Dad shuffling around upstairs on a Saturday morning. It would be nice to always find someone to hug in the house, especially Mom.

Those were the days.

But these are the days now.

Sitting in my office, I’ll suddenly have this out of body experience of wondering “Why am I here? Where do I belong?”

Thinking back on the last 10 years of my life. Back when I was 13 and constantly feeling a push to go forward. Now I just want to step back.

All of a sudden all the things I have accomplished and gone through in life will melt into these series of flashbacks. As epic as it sounds…

It makes me sad, nostalgic and lonely.

Lonely for the people who were there along the way; sad at the goodbyes to the people who came and went so suddenly, and then missing the ones that are still by my side though they are a thousand miles away.

Home isn’t a place…and yet it’s a place we are constantly longing for.

But until we get to Heaven, the longing will never cease. Can you imagine, being in a room full of faces you love and cherish? We get a taste of that every once in a while, but it brings tears to my eyes when I think how Heaven will never have loneliness, heartbreak or regrets. It will be full of those people who pointed you to Christ with how they loved you.

We see in a mirror dimly now, but when we get to Heaven, we will be fully known. We will see Christ face to face. That separation will no longer pine at us.

But today I will sit in my office and go through the motions of today, and constantly seek to do what God is calling me to be. Though my questions will sometimes raise to “why am I here? What am I doing?”, God has this amazing story for my life, and though I can only see through it dimly, and sometimes not at all when it is darkened with my confusion, grief and loneliness; I’ll trust His plans are far better than my own.

A Bit of Musings From Me to You

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Hello! Did you miss me? Should I dare ask that question? Partly because I feel like my little corner has been forgotten about because it’s been left vacant for too long.  I’ve tried to sit down and write something deep and thoughtful, but honestly? I feel like every thought that I try to spill out onto this blank white sheet of computer space doesn’t sound right.  I feel like everything I write is just a bunch of empty, scattered words.

Summer break has come to a sad goodbye because school has finally begun.  Funny how three months feels like a long stretch of time but once it’s over with you wonder where summer went and why didn’t you enjoy it more?  I spent my last couple weeks of break in Colorado.  My entire summer I felt had been centered around going to Summit, a Christian worldview conference in Manitou Springs.  When the day finally arrived to go…I honestly didn’t want to.  Maybe my nerves were getting to me.  I mean, seriously, I’m the type of person who needs motivation just to get out of her PJs in the morning or anything that has socializing involved.

I arrived at Summit and knew absolutely no one.  I looked at the heavy schedule they placed in front of us and felt like two weeks was going to be an eternity before I could go back home. Because home is familiar.  I know what to do and where to go and who my people are.  Mealtime was especially stressful since you had to pick a table to sit at and you didn’t know the people sitting there.  My introverted side was getting the best of me, but then I got to know my roommates. Suddenly the people in the cafeteria became my classmates.  We were all here for one thing and that was to grow in Christ.  I never before have been surrounded by such brilliant minded students, speakers and staff.  By graduation, I didn’t want to leave the old hotel in Manitou.  Even now, it seems like an entirely different world, a small corner where you can just feel Jesus in every corner and crevice of it’s old structure.

I know it sounds a little cheesy to say this…but I felt like I lost myself over the course of two years.   I graduated high school and started college; I went from one major to the next; tried all sorts of different classes; landed new jobs…I forgot who I was in Christ.

It’s such a terrible thing to be lost…but it’s so-so sweet to be found.

It’s not about the majors, the jobs…goodness, it’s not even about yourself.  Life is such a generalized series of events.  We grow up, we graduate high school, we choose a major, we graduate college, we get a job that we kind of sorta like, have a family, retire…then die.

At least that was the conversation I overheard by two students today while waiting for class to start.  “Who cares how long your in college, heck, people go and get there masters and then change their minds.  You might as well stay in college as long as you can because then after that you have to start real life, get a job and then die.”

Ah, how wrong is this person behind me? I thought.  How pointless.  How dumb.  Why on earth are we here if we are just meant to die and turn to dust?

The sad fact is, I fell into this lie.  It’s a strange thing, we pay all this money to go to college and get a bachelors, then a masters, and keep extending our time in college to avoid “real life”, as if college is a safety net that we cling to before we are forced to fall into reality.  I fell into the lie that life is about these series of events where death is the ultimate outcome.  I look back on my life and it isn’t so simple, it never was intended to be, nor will it ever be.

Death is the ultimate outcome.

But it’s not our eternity.

My eternity is in Heaven.  What I do on this earth should be a reflection of Christ; my entire mindset should be only to glorify Him in all that I do. Sadly though, I get blinded by my own desires and personal gain. I kept choosing majors that I hoped would give me security and stability. Why do I seek comfort from this world when it only greets me with empty words and promises? Here is the finer things in life, where all of your troubles will be solved.  But I find that the higher I step on the ladder, it gives me more burdens then the previous steps.

But then I went to Summit.  I realized that I don’t want stability and comfort that the world has to offer, but that I want the stability and comfort that can only be found in Christ.

I want truth.

I want Jesus.

I have this unsatisfied curiosity now that I don’t know how, nor do I want, to quench, thanks to Summit.

Someone once told me that there is no point in trying to change the world because people don’t change.

But then, what is the point in anything?  What is the point in healing the sick when we are just going to die?  What is the point in fixing anything when it’s inevitably going to break again?

What I’m saying is this…

Death is not our eternity (which I stated earlier).

That is why we should care…we should care about the souls inside the bodies.  The sick, the poor, the world and all of the souls it contains.  We should fight for the lives of the innocent.  We should stand up against controversial issues and laws made that go against our Christian morals and beliefs.

As Christians we are called to be the light in the dark, and to lead others to Christ.  In the end, it does matter.

Ah, to my fellow student, who will sit behind me in class for this entire semester, who thinks that death is nothing but an end.

Let me tell you, it’s only the beginning.