Coming & Going

We celebrated our homecoming yesterday, and it was a fantastic day. My thanks to Gary and all those who worked so hard to make it happen. Homecomings are good days, times to forget the miles and years that separate us from each other and just enjoy being together again. That's why we have family reunions, homecomings, and all other manner of "coming together and catching up" events.

In some sense, I feel we have homecomings because we also expect to have homegoings. Those who move and leave us for other places will eventually pass away before we can come together once more. They will have gone home, entered into eternal rest and the joy of their Master. Never knowing when that will happen, we get together on this side of eternity as often as we can, treasuring our earthly time together as much as possible.

Yet I wonder if we have that wrong, backwards somehow. Shouldn't we weep because we remain in a fallen world, that we're another year as pilgrims and sojourners, strangers in a strange land? And shouldn't we celebrate when someone has a homegoing, that their faith has become sight, and they are safe and perfect forevermore? After all, that's our Christian hope, our eternal endgame: everlasting, perfect life in the home of the blessed.

I enjoy our homecomings in this life, but I also look forward to that final homecoming when everyone, all who confess Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, will be truly home at long last, never to part again.