{Homecoming}

{Homecoming}

There's no place like home.

It's a comfort to think that phrase, when we are sleeping on hard mattresses in a hotel across the country, or eating sticky airplane food, or living out of an unorganized suitcase, or hiking through unforgiving brush on a backpacking trip; this is when we think those words. It's when we are someplace that we don't belong, that we long to go back to where we know we are meant to be.

When we are somewhere where we won't be staying long,

when we are somewhere strange,

we long to be back at home.

Because we can't get the love and the care – and the food and familiar beds and familiar sounds – anywhere else.

We know that at home, we are loved.

We can run away, seeking that love other places. But we never find it. No one know us and loves us as our family does, at home.

There's no place like home.

We wander through the world, working and traveling and building out lives and our fortunes: where thieves break through and steal.

We search for love, but it's never as perfect as out Father's love. Everywhere we travel, we know it will be no more like home than any other place on this earth. Because we have no home on this earth. We won't be staying here long.

This isn't where we belong.

Our home is in heaven, where thieves do not break through, nor steal.

And there is no place like that home.

We await the day when we will no longer wish to be home and when we will no longer have to longingly say that there is no place like home – because we will be home. The Celestial City will be the the place we will never want to wander from.

There, our Father knows us and loves us.

There we will be free from searching.

There we won't be aliens and strangers in a hostile land, as we are here on earth.

Here we are always wandering.

There, we will be home.