The Way Home
As Christians, our lives are a journey, a journey towards home. It’s no accident that world literature is filled with the concept of the journey – everything from The Odyssey to stories in Grimm’s Fairy Tales to The Lord of the Rings.
The great journeys in the Bible include Abraham and Moses, and also Paul’s missionary journeys. We all should think about these great journeys, and compare them to our own journeys home. And what is our final home, our destination? Heaven.
You should start with a reminder of Who is with us on our Journey, and I was listening to Tina Turner last night when she sang “We Don’t Need another Hero.” The chorus goes “We don’t need another hero, we don’t need to know the way home.” Well Tina is great, but that’s not true. Jesus Christ is our Hero – our Messiah and our leader – and we definitely need to know the way home to God.
I don’t think our journey through this world is easy; it’s never that. But sometimes the road is easier than others. Sometimes it’s rocky and hard and sometimes it’s awful during times of loss and suffering. But the key is to believe, to praise God in all things. The imagery of the journey is that of the King and the Shepherd: both the great and the humble.
And the end of that journey is Heaven.
There is a beautiful quote from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, and it is no accident that Professor Tolkien was a Christian. “That night they heard no noises. But either in his dreams or out of them, he could not tell which, Frodo heard a sweet singing running in his mind: a song that seemed to come like a pale light behind a grey rain-curtain, and growing stronger to turn the veil all to glass and silver, until at last it was rolled back, and a far green country opened before him under a swift sunrise.”