This World Is Not My Home

There are many in my family that strive for bigger and better houses, new cars, beautiful furniture, fun gadgets and toys. I like all of those things and I do my share of striving or I wouldn't have any of these toys, but my focus is different. You see, as others close to me have worked hard and bought bigger and better houses every year although their families hadn't grown I haven't felt that drive. For a while now I have wondered what is wrong with me. I mean surely if I tried, we could do the same thing. But I just haven't wanted to, even though we are squeezed into our house, I am content. I don't want to try to increase our payment and the duration of our payment by moving out and up. I just don't see it as being prudent. Now if we pay off our home and decide to sell and relocate, that is another story. Then we would only buy a home for what we get for this home, if we were able to move into a bigger and better home for that, great! But I just don't see the wisdom in being stuck in a home that realistically you don't have any chance of paying off. But still somewhere inside me I thought that this feeling of mine was really backed by laziness or some other equally unpleasant motive.

Well this morning I was reading through a book titled Living More With Less by Doris Janzen Longacre. I had an "aha!" moment. I finally figured out why I am not motivated to spend every extra cent on my home. I don't need to, this isn't really my home. Here the passage that brought me my breakthrough:

This world is not my home. Here is the starting point. As good as it is to make a house comfortable, Christians freely admit their longing for Home. No inheritance, real-estate settlement, or faultless house plan fully answers the cry for roots. Christians consciously travel toward a better housing developement--a home in the city "whose builder and maker is God".

Living by this hope (not just singing about it!) means less time, money, and personal pride invested into housing. Expectations go down, contentment go up. Furthermore, with the assurance that "in my Father's house are many rooms," we can sometimes accept homelessness, as Jesus did. He became one of the refugee's, the shack-dwellers, the evicted of the ages.

The above passage made me realize that it just isn't important to me, because something much better is. I am not lazy, I just know that this is not my true home. I don't want to run after those things. So I am so encouraged now that the Lord has revealed something in my heart that I didn't even know was there. Isn't He so good!