God is a God of variety, as my mentor John once said. Consider the powerful dynamic inherent in the creativity throughout the Earth – in fact, throughout the Universe. It says somewhere in the Bible: “When I consider the work of the heavens, the work of your fingers, what is man that you are mindful of him?” It’s beyond our comprehension.
I think about my maternal grandfather who served in the Royal Navy during the war. He was a cockney and came from a hard-up background, even sleeping in an empty bath when he was a boy. He explored all over the world with the navy, up to the Arctic and sailing as far as India. It must have been incredibly exciting to see the sights of the world considering he was not a wealthy man.
Then, after the war, with children to support, he got a job using his skills as an electrician in a factory. It was too late for him to fulfil his dream to become a policeman. He would tell my mother, a young girl then, about how he’d look up at the workhouse ceiling sometimes and yearn to be in his greenhouse at home, tending to the vegetables and plants. I consider how challenging it must have been for him to find himself in a factory hour after hour, day by day, week by week and year by year – after exploring the entire globe with his shipmates. But he didn’t complain and stuck it out to put food on the table.
My late father was a restless man who never took his foot off the accelerator. He was always in France on business. My mother, on the other hand, loves the home scene: enjoying local sights and sounds near her local town and with little desire to venture further afield. Unfortunately I have both natures conflicting in me. I can be at home and yearn to be in an exotic part of the world. On the other hand. I can find myself in a strange place, away from home, and yearn to be back in our house. It’s rather frustrating for my wife!
Was Jesus restless on Earth? I think he was content in his circumstances in the three or so decades he appeared but also restless for home: his real home, the heavenly home. He wanted to be with his Father and knew that he was a traveller, in that sense, passing through our world for a short time, to set the stage for the future. “And if I go and prepare a place for you,” he once said. “I will come back and take you to be with me, so that you also may be where I am.”
As Christians, we are content and restless too: content in the love of our Lord, ‘the Father of the heavenly lights’ but restless in wanting to be home: away from the tent we live in and into the house. “For 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,” said the apostle Paul.
We’re as naked as Adam and Eve were, wanting to be clothed and in the Edenish place promised by God. Paul again summed it up perfectly, writing to the Philippians: “For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain. If I am to go on living in the body, this will mean fruitful labor for me. Yet what shall I choose? I do not know! I am torn between the two: I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far; but it is more necessary for you that I remain in the body.”
Well, the promise of a thrilling heavenly home still stands. We are commanded to love God because God commands love over us and to know the joy of the Lord is our strength – and trust it will happen in the end. The apostle Paul also wrote he had learned the secret of contentment in all circumstances. What was that secret? The joy of the Lord. We are freed by the Holy Spirit to live with Him – not so we fall into darkness again and neither so that we feel burdened by the law, but rather to live in simple liberty by knowing Him. He is the Alpha and Omega. In a sense, the road we travel on and the home.
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