When I was a kid, we used to go grocery shopping at the commissary all afternoon and buy a carload of food. Kids, would you believe it? Back in a day, $55 filled up the trunk and half the back seat of a huge car that was almost a boat (the old, 4-door Gran Torino—anyone else know what I’m talking about?).
We’d get home, drag it all inside, and put it all away. Then my Asian mom would open the frigerator door and declare, “There’s nothing to eat in here!” My dad used to get annoyed when she said that till he figured out what she meant.
For her, American food was just okay. She mostly preferred her own food from her own native country. When we came back from the Asian market with her favorite foods, then she was content. I loved food from both places, so I was a bit puzzled as to why she would feel that way after having been in the states for so many years.
I get it now. I recently experienced her longing for home myself. August 5 
was my one-year anniversary of having moved to the east coast.
I’m still not sure why the Lord called me here, but I’m okay with it. After more than 40 years, I’m in this journey with Jesus for the long haul.
I’m definitely not homesick for the area I used to live, but I do feel wistful sometimes when I think of my friends, my family, and the warm, dry weather.
Recently, someone told me about a local cultural/ethnic festival that was happening the next weekend. It would be home territory for me, so I was excited about going. I arrived and found the place teeming with people who were from my native land!
It was soothing to be embedded in a language group that I could understand. It was fun to see people’s reactions when I spoke the language. They knew I did not learn it from a book and were more receptive to assisting me and answering my questions. I even met only the second person in my entire life who’d been born in the same military hospital as I had been!
I enjoyed watching the special exhibits and explaining what was happening. I loved going through the vendor booths and seeing familiar toys, trinkets, publications, household items, and foods. My mother would have loved it, too. And when I found out about the specialty market that sold food from “home,” I was almost in heaven.
That’s how my mother felt. And now, that’s how I feel. Not apples falling far from the same tree, but chopsticks formed from the same bamboo stalks. Does that illustration work?
The food from home reminded me of home. It wasn’t the same as being there, but the reminders were comforting. They brought me back to earlier days when life was uncomplicated and people weren’t so ugly, hateful, and violent.
Of course, as a child, I was rather sheltered and I didn’t have any responsibilities. Our family was almost poor, but I didn’t know it because we always had food, shelter, and new clothes for the new school year.
Heaven is a lot like that, except that it’s a place we have never been to. (I write about heaven a lot.) How can we be homesick for a place we’ve never been to?
Easy. While my mother’s homesickness was for her home country, my true home country is really not the place of my physical birth. It’s the place of my spiritual rebirth: heaven.
The food of heaven—the Word of God—gives us a taste of what joys, what righteousness, and what glory awaits us as we anticipate our departure. Click To TweetGod pulled heaven down and pressed it indelibly into my heart. The Spirit of the living God inside us then draws us back to the heavens, a place that, though we haven’t been there before, He has been before. He knows what it’s like and can heartily recommend it!
The food of heaven—the Word of God—gives us a taste of what joys, what righteousness, and what glory awaits us as we anticipate our departure (Revelation 21 & 22). It’s small comfort, but sometimes that’s all we are shown.
It’s at those times when we realize that all we need is what we were given. His presence is our passport, and He will stay right with us all the way through our arrival in the heavenlies.
Sometimes I feel like Jesus did when He said He didn’t have a home. As a man, He never owned any real estate, though He created the entire universe. I’ve never owned a house, either. I’ve never been married or had any children, so I don’t have an immediate family beyond my one sibling. The family of God became my forever family when I first got saved.
When all of us get to our heavenly home, it will be filled with the family of God. And it will all be rental property that Jesus signed the lease for with His own blood.
There, we will all be sheltered, life will be uncomplicated, and there will be absolutely no one who is ugly, hateful, and violent unless they gave their hearts and lives to Jesus and He transformed them. No one will be married, even those who are happily married today.
When life is stupid and people, stupider, that kind of “permanent” comfort food—the Word of God—works for me. Thank You, Jesus, for reminding me that this world is not my final destination; heaven is.
SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT: Beginning Saturday, September 1, I will be praying over single Christians each and every day in September. Head on over to my Face book page, For single Christians: One is a Whole Number and find the post from Saturday, August 11, for more info!
