Copyright by Shea Oakley<\/p>\n
All rights reserved<\/p>\n
It is not easy to be a pilgrim. The sons and daughters of God live in a world which we have come to realize can no longer completely fulfill us and, truthfully, never could. We long to be in the place our Father is, the only place that we can truly call home now that we have come to know His Son, but we are not there, not yet. The pain of the Christian sojourner is the perception of being so long in transit from the temporal to the eternal. We yearn for the redemption of our bodies and the time when we will enter the life that truly is life. But for now we must wait and none of us knows how long that wait might be.<\/p>\n
It would be one thing if we were fully reconciled to living the life of a pilgrim, the life led by our Savior while He walked the Earth. The truth is that few of us can claim to have never attempted to futilely sink permanent roots into the troubled soil of this world. Most if not all human beings want to have a home. While some may enjoy a certain degree of wanderlust the vast majority of us desire, like the birds of the air, to nest. We long for a safe haven, a place of comfort and solidity, where we can live with those whom we love and who love us, forever. But nothing is forever which is wedded to the world as it now exists.<\/p>\n
This is not to say that the believer has to be a complete vagabond. Christ did not command us all to wander aimlessly through life without any kind of \u201csafe harbor.\u201d Throughout our lives we will know the comforts of temporal dwelling places, homes for a season. Not every one of us is a Paul, a man who seemingly was always in motion throughout his lifetime. While it is true that some believers are called to that kind of life many of us will not venture far from the place of our birth. But even if we live in only a few dwellings and never are more than a handful of miles from our hometown the sense of not being able to find true permanence in our lives here will haunt us. It can be no other way for the Christian.<\/p>\n
The abode of God is our only ultimately real dwelling place. It is strange to think of home being a location we have never physically visited. The human tendency is to romanticize the place we knew as a child as our truest home, but the new Heavens and the new Earth come at the end of our journey through this fallen world, not at its beginning. Our hearts will never be at rest until we enter the gates of the New Jerusalem and see the One whose very presence makes it the destination of all who love Him.<\/p>\n
In the meantime we must learn to endure being where our greatest longings for home cannot yet be fully realized. It is difficult to live here, but we can trust that the God of all places had our best interests in mind when He decided that our being born from above would not immediately bring us above. In fact feeling like this world is not our true home is one of the things that tell us we are children of God; that we cannot fully be at rest this side of Heaven is actually a sign of spiritual health. All that remains for us is to endure and know that, whether by death or our Lord\u2019s return, our final homecoming is not that far away.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Copyright by Shea Oakley All rights reserved It is not easy to be a pilgrim. The sons and daughters of God live in a world which we have come to realize can no longer completely fulfill us and, truthfully, never could. We long to be in the place our Father is, the only place that… <\/p>\n