By Kiefer Dooley
“Home is where the heart is.”
“There is no place like home.”
“Home sweet home.”
Chances are, you’ve heard at least one of the preceding clichés about “home.”
For many people, the idea of “home” carries with it feelings of warmth, belonging, safety, security, purpose, and identity. For others, it’s a place of heartache, broken dreams, and longing.
Whether you’re a person who has a great “home” experience and feel that it holds true to the ideal, or you have experienced “home” as a painful, disorganized, and chaotic environment, it’s important to realize that our human view is skewed and does not offer a true picture of what home really is.
Regardless of our experience, as humans, we are all living under the shadow of a lie.
Do you remember the story of the Prodigal Son, told in Luke 15? I’m sure you do. Jesus tells us about a young man, who from all outward appearances, has a fantastic home. But he’s not satisfied. For the Prodigal Son, home is boring. He’d rather trade safety and security for fleeting, inward-focused “adventures.” Fast forward through all manner of partying and licentious living and the young man finds himself longing for what was just a short time earlier his uninteresting home. As he planned his disgraceful return, the son rehearsed a speech and prepared to list out, from A to Z, every last transgression he had made against his Father.
The flaw in the young man’s thinking is a mistake that we often make today. Missing the point. He had relegated home to simply being a place, thinking, “If only I could be a servant in the walls of my Father’s estate.” With this language of walls and beams, the son is excluding the most powerful aspect of what makes our houses homes. He’s leaving out love.
All the while, the Father is overflowing with love. He sees his lost son not as coming home in disgrace, but just coming home! As the son approaches, the Father runs to meet him. He’s not counting transgressions. He’s not waiting to list out the tiny details of the son’s wrongs, or even the blatant acts of disrespect and sin. In fact, we see the Father run to the gate to protect the son from religious leaders who were waiting to do just that. The leaders at the gate saw through the same human eyes as the son. They watched a disheveled, pig-slop covered list of sins, a living embodiment of the broken law, trudge broken toward the Father’s house. The Father only saw His son.
This year, the RMC Youth Ministries Department is going to focus on embracing the idea of being at home with Jesus. It’s a radical idea that we take for granted—a love so unique and all-encompassing.
You see, as humans, we have a difficult time comprehending the true beauty of finding our home in the embrace of Jesus. We are displaced. We struggle to even imagine what being at home with Jesus looks like. We paint our own lies over the lies of the devil. We degrade the value of the Father’s gift by gritting our teeth and trying to measure up. We fight against love, asking for a place at the servant’s table while rehearsing a list of our transgressions—completely missing the fact that in the grandeur of His monumental love, Jesus has prepared for us a party beyond our wildest dreams!
–Kiefer Dooley is RMC youth ministries director. Email him at: [email protected]