People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return.
Hebrews 11:14-15 (NIV)
The Road Home Stayed Open
People who talk about themselves as foreigners and strangers are looking for a country of their own. The writer of Hebrews says that about a long line of men and women who died without receiving what they’d been promised, and who welcomed the promise from a distance. They still had a country behind them. The roads to it stayed open, and the old place was where they’d left it.
He praises them for the wanting. Each year they stayed was a year they wanted the country ahead of them more than the one they’d come from, and they wanted it with nothing in hand except a promise and the word of the one who made it. They died that way, every one of them, still calling themselves foreigners and strangers on the earth.
A man of forty stands under a departure board with his coat over his arm, neither glad to be going nor sorry about it. He’s flown this route enough times that it’s a route now. The city he moved away from is three hours out and a seat on a Thursday afternoon, and he could sleep there tonight if he decided to.
A church keeps its service time long after somebody stops coming to it, and the ones who left could walk in on a Sunday and be recognized at the door. That long line of men and women went on wanting a country they’d never seen, week after ordinary week, with a road behind them they could have taken on any of those weeks. The wanting had to get through the weeks when nothing much happened, and most weeks are like that.
They were longing for a better country, a heavenly one, and God isn’t ashamed to be called their God. He has prepared a city for them.
A Prayer to Remember
I know the way back to most of what I’ve left, and some of it still has my name on it. You’ve prepared a city I’ve never seen and can’t picture, God. Give me an appetite for it. Tomorrow morning the old road is going to look reasonable again, and I’d like to be facing the other way by then.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
