Holidays are hard away from family. What surprised me is that this 4th of July was one of the hardest so far! It may be due to the fact that we just had my mom, Kurtis' sister, and Kurtis parents come to visit us over the past month, and they were all back at home in the states, and we were here. Don't get me wrong, I love Ecuador. It is a beautiful place with lovely people, but I don't think it will ever truly be home.
But in truth, neither is Arizona. I read a passage from CS Lewis recently where he talked about our longing for home and our constant desire to fulfill that here on earth. We go through great effort to create special moments, but they never quite live up to what we hoped for. We remember times with our family in the past and it brings back warm feelings of home, but when we try to recreate those moments or create new moments, they are never perfect, they never quite feel like home to us. The reason being is that we were not created for earth. Our real home, our real longing is for heaven.
Philippians 3:20 says, "But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ."
This really resonated with me on our last trip back to the states. We were so excited to be with friends and family, but in the midst of our joy, there was still pain and struggle. We still had work to do, time constraints that kept us from seeing so many people we wanted to, there was still brokenness in families, and our best friends found out the day before we got home that their son Moses had cancer. We were so thankful that The Lord allowed us to be home with our loved ones, but honestly, I am thankful that it isn't really home and that my heart longs for my real home in heaven with Jesus, where there will be no more tears, no more pain, no more cancer!
I had a very strange experience last night while I slept. I am not sure if it was a dream or was real, but I was dying. I could feel my heart failing me. I could feel my spirit separating from my body and I was whispering to Kurtis "I love you" over and over. The thing that surprised me though, was that I wasn't scared. I was excited! I felt ready to finally be with Jesus in my home that I was created for.
Obviously, The Lord did not take me to heaven last night, but it was a reminder to me that I need to keep living with eyes that are focused on Him, my true home, and do my best to do His work with the time he has given me in this foreign land.
C.S Lewis (excerpt from Mere Christianity)
"If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others to do the same."
