Till We Are Home

From the 5th floor, I stood looking down from the window at the roads below me. Cars driving about, people going home, going to work, picking up friends, driving alone listening to music. I imagined those drivers were doing their normal thing. Living their usual days and going about their normal lives.

That’s what I so wanted in that moment. 

My wife lying in her hospital bed recovering from a very difficult surgery to remove the tumor from her tongue, I remembered doing this exact thing two years ago when I stared out of the hospital room window during my 2nd hospital stay, this time due to COVID for 4 days almost immediately after just getting out of a 10-day hospital stay for a bacterial infection in my leg. My leg bandaged up, oxygen pumping into my nose, I stared out of my window just wanting to be like those people out there living their normal lives.

Sadly, it’s been a long season of this the past few years with plenty of other opportunities to look at others’ lives. The inevitable comparison and watching families go about their normal routines and special events such as holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas, getting ready for school, going home from church all together, gearing up for summer vacations…I watch them with a desire for normalcy that they have and my family does not. To my knowledge, none of these families did those normal activities with the same grief we had from losing our youngest daughter last year. They celebrated holidays with full cheer. They sent all of their kiddos to school. They rented a hotel or house for their summer vacation that would house all of their family members.

I just wanted normalcy again. Over and over and over again these past 4 summers, I have been faced with the same longing. But what I had thought was a longing for normalcy turned out to be more of a confrontation with a different frustration.

I am not home.

In his 2^nd letter to the church in Corinth, Paul says, “in this tent we groan, longing to put on our heavenly dwelling,” (2 Cor 5:2). The potentially life-threatening hospital stays I endured 3 years ago, my wife’s 2nd bout with cancer, and especially losing my little one have all been groanings. Oh, and how I have groaned. Because what I’m realizing more and more is I’m longing to be home.

This realization of what my real struggle was with hit me last year while watching my wife endure her battle with cancer. When we got home from the hospital, I helped her get settled and comfortable, unpacked, and then I started to unwind myself. During that brief calm, I breathed a giant sigh of relief and was overcome by a gigantic wave of gratefulness to be home. No longer at the hospital. But home. 

We were home. And, I think you know that feeling – that feeling when arrive home from a long journey away or after a long day at work or seemingly unending kids’ sports activities, you get home and your body relaxes. You are able to breathe again. Peace overcomes you. And you settle in. 

And if Paul is right, and he is, then this feeling we get when we arrive home here is just an echo of the home that awaits us as Christians. Here, we will keep groaning and longing…we are unsettled and unable to truly breathe easy. But, there, with the Lord, we will be home as Paul tells us in verse 8 that being home is with the Lord. 

I still deal with issues from that bacterial infection. My wife continues to recover. I miss the heck out of my little one. But these groanings won’t always be my every day. 

One day my wife and I will have resurrected bodies. 

One day I will hold and kiss my little one again. 

One day I won’t groan anymore, because I will be home with the Lord. 

So for now, I will take what Paul says in that passage and be of good courage (v6), walking by faith and not by sight (v7). My aim in this blog is to tell you about this journey, sharing in our felt desires to find normalcy, to find our way home in the midst of trying circumstances and hard days – 

Till we are home…