Home
Outside of Christ Jesus, life is utterly meaningless. But in Him is life in all its fullness.
Home.
As a child, I knew it to be where my mother lived. Where she was, there was home. Coming from school, I’d anxiously look for my mother’s traces—her scent, her voice, I’d follow after the sound of her movements to where she was. Only after I’d seen her was I at ease—truly at home.
I knew my father to be the one who comes home, and when he did he would find me and my mother and my siblings waiting for him.
In school, they told us our country was our home. Our inheritance. Our nationality. Our place of origin. We were born here. We belonged here. It had a flag, with its colours and symbols, it distinguished our home from other’s. There was also a song, in singing in it we showed allegiance to our home.
Of course, as adults, we learn of all the ways our national homes systematically work to un-home us. How they institutionally produce our deaths through poverty, capitalism and classism. That in organised politics are the death-making conditions that descent into our everyday, into our ordinary. Think of the capitalist stigmatization of the poor, the privatizing of proper healthcare despite it being a fundamental human right, the demanding of our labour yet invisibilizing it through erasure and devaluation. We remain imprisoned in fatigue and impoverishment.
We learn of the grim nature of our national homes.
Our homes are what we survived.
In secondary school, I found my transit back home from my far-from-home boarding school, rather unsettling, though I did not openly admit this. Over time, school had grown to feel more like home, and my peers more like siblings than my own. I quietly nursed the guilt of preferring school to what had always been home.
Information from Our World In Data reads:
In adolescence we spend the most time with our parents, siblings, and friends; as we enter adulthood we spend more time with our co-workers, partners, and children; and in our later years we spend an increasing amount of time alone.
Psychologists will rightfully advice you to learn to be on your own.
To this day, I have never felt more un-homed in myself than I did in my early adulthood. I was newly out there, into the the world, and everything around me was changing, fast. I had taken on a demanding degree. My closest friends, whom I had always relied on for emotional support, were all away pursuing different things. I met new people nearly everyday. This too was a demand. I was also fat, and people received me in what I perceived to be subtle disdain for my appearance.
Weary of all the microagressions, the being singled out, the being marked “different” and undeserving of common social courtesies, unable to unsee all the ways I went unseen, I chose to be alone. As much as I could, I isolated myself. I hated it. I longed for a change. It never came.
Over the course of my lifetime, home has meant different things to me. Now it means the LORD after a personal encounter with Him.
Jesus is home to me. My entire life is anchored in having faith in Him.
The Scriptures teach me that as a believer this Earth is not my home. I have no qualms with this.
For our citizenship is in heaven, from which also we eagerly wait for a Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ. Philippians 3:20
While an unbeliever, I was convinced we lived in a cosmically indifferent universe. That life had utterly no meaning. I considered it intellectual honesty, damning but true, to admit we were not part of any grand design, our lives served no greater purpose, and that the quality of human life was much poorer than most people recognize it for.
The awareness of all this, of my vulnerability and insignificance was heavy. It punctured my soul. It left me distorted in many ways.
My life consisted coaxing something to persist. Perhaps hope. Perhaps purpose. Something.
We seldom talk about how hoping effects exhaustion and indifference.
The Scriptures, as always:
“Everything is meaningless,” says the Teacher, “completely meaningless.” Ecclesiastes 12:8 NLT
Solomon, the wisest man to ever live, we are told, asserted there was no point to life. It was meaningless. Vanity upon vanity. Like chasing the wind.
Now Jesus’ own words:
Now someone greater than Solomon is here—but you refuse to listen. Matthew 12:42 NLT
And Jesus being greater in wisdom than Solomon, what is His philosophy?
The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly. John 10:10 NKJV
When Jesus visited, He repaired the punctures in my soul. I was given purpose. I was given meaning. I was given life in all its fullness.
It remains true to me now that outside of Christ Jesus, life is utterly meaningless. But in Him is life in all its fullness. Life, and life more abundantly.
