When I was leaving Vegas, I literally said bye to my bedroom. Funny how something not alive can have such a special place in my heart. Then, as my plane took off, I said bye to Las Vegas and God blessed me with a wonderful aerial view of the Las Vegas strip as my flight flew over the city. I felt a little weird. I was leaving home.
Now that I'm in the process of moving into my apartment in New York, things are fun but different. I'm getting adjusted to the noise outside my window, the fight to get places through Times Square, the marked up food prices, and the confusion in the subway systems depending on the time of day. Everything is so different when I think about home now.
But there's one thing that's not different, and that's the comfort and the "home" I have in God. Even though everything around me is unfamiliar, I am familiar with the peace I have in God to the point where it feels like another home. It's been a nice reminder that my true home, my citizenship, is in God's nation. That's home. My true home has not changed and although there is the pressure for me to conform to the ways of the city, I can't do that fully, because I am living as a citizen of God.
"Dear friends, I urge you, as aliens and strangers in the world, to abstain from sinful desires, which war against your soul. Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us." - 1 Peter 2:2:11-12
It's funny how Peter refers to us as aliens and strangers to the world. The initial feeling I get from that passage is that we don't belong here. But in actuality, I think we do. I think that this is a temporary place that God has placed us in to call home, but our true home - the home that we will long for, and the home that all of us will and should remember and look forward to in our lives, is God's home. We're here representing Christ :-).
