Home

Thomas Wolfe said that you can never go home again. The ancient philosopher, Heraclitus, similarly said that you can never step in the same river twice. Everything is in flux, change comes to the places we love best, and nothing ever stays the same. In a way, this is what keeps us moving forward. But I can't help feeling sad about the places I remember.

My mother once told me that she had no idea where she should be buried. This is not an immediate concern, barring some sort of tragic accident we've got plenty of time before she needs to figure it out, but I understand her underlying concern. We are a transient family--gypsies who have followed the American dream. She left home at eighteen. Moved from a sleepy, small New Jersey town to a suburb of Chicago. She lived in the fringes of suburban life until she was twenty-eight. I was three when my father moved our whole family to a college town in the middle of Indiana. We were supposed to stay two or three years tops. Twenty-two years later, my parents moved to Ohio. By then my sister and I were both married and living our own lives back in suburban Chicago. Now my parents are back in a college town on the other side of Indiana. So where is home?

My mother was raised in a family that could trace its generational heritage within a ten-mile radius. Her grandparents lived a few blocks apart. She stopped at her aunt's house on the way home from school on a regular basis. My grandfather is buried in the family plot at the Dutch Reformed Church. Several of the streets near my great-grandmother's house were named after my ancestors.

We have no ties to the Indiana town where I was raised. The only family home I ever knew has been sold to strangers. The school I attended for much of that time was gutted and rebuilt my senior year. I remember returning to see the changes at my old school and getting lost. There were hallways that didn't exist anymore. Places that burned in my memory could not be found. It was disconcerting. I've tried to go back to visit, but it feels like there's no there there. The there that I remember isn't there.

Odd as it is, I sometimes feel like there's a conspiracy to systematically remove the places of my memory.

I live in a house that is a hundred and fifteen years old. Old houses need constant upkeep and we are perpetually changing the fabric of this old building. At some point, not much of the original will remain. So will it be the same house?

Second Corinthians 5:1 tells us that: "we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands."

Paul is talking about our bodies as our earthly tents. Because of the second law of thermodynamics, we know that while the quantity of matter/energy remains the same, the quality of energy/matter deteriorates over time. Nothing stays the same, everything is in flux, we're all headed for entropy. Maybe it doesn't matter that you can't really go home again. Maybe it doesn't matter where your earthly body is buried. We have an eternal home in heaven...and it is built of stuff that doesn't break down or change.

Maranatha! Come, Lord Jesus!