Finding Home - Part Six

Reorienting the Homing Device

 I can lie down anywhere in this universe bathed around by my own Father’s Spirit. The very universe has come to seem so homey!

Frank Laubach

            The only way we can experience the fullness of Life is to give up trying to acquire it on our own. We must surrender ourselves completely to God. This is not merely a matter of believing that our attempts to acquire worth and significance are idolatrous and unsatisfying. A person can easily believe this and yet fail to relinquish their idols and surrender to God. We enter into the Life of God only when our false gods have in fact been relinquished and only when God is in fact reigning over our life.

            To the extent that our sense of worth and significance is caught up in the grand illusion—to the extent that our identity is rooted in the “flesh”—abandoning our false gods will feel like a kind of death. In fact, it is a kind of death, for the “old self” that relied on idols to feel worthwhile and significant is being killed. This is why Jesus says we must lose our life in order to find real Life and why Paul testified he was crucified with Christ (Matthew 16:25; Galatians 2:20; 5:24; 6:14).

Are you awake?

            Still, as scary and as difficult as dying to the false way of living may initially be, nothing could be more liberating. Living with perpetual hunger, spending most of our mental life in the past and future, chasing after pathetic false gods, is complete bondage. When we cling to things that are perpetually threatened and that we know we’ll eventually lose, it inevitably creates in us worry, anger, jealousy, envy, frustration, strife, violence, and despair—things Paul referred to as “works of the flesh” (Galatians 5:19 KJV). To die to the flesh is the greatest liberation possible. Now one is in a position to live in the moment and feel fully alive.

            As we are freed from the grand illusion that we can meet our own needs, our built-in homing device begins to work correctly. We’re on our way home. And we don’t have to strive to find it. On the contrary, the instant we relinquish the world of idols and turn to God, he is there. He has always been there. In him we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28). He never leaves us or forsakes us, whether we are aware of him or not (Matthew 28:20). There is nowhere we can run and hide from his presence (Psalm 139:8).

            The moment we surrender, we are home. In fact, the moment we stop chasing and clinging we discover that we never really left home. Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, we wake up from a dream and discover that all we’ve been looking for surrounds us at every moment. When we stop looking at the world as though God didn’t exist, we find we are surrounded each and every moment with a love that infuses our life with a worth and significance that couldn’t possibly be improved on. This is the home we were created to eternally live in.

            Coming home is simply a matter of waking up from the illusion that you aren’t already there. Yet, while the belief that the love of God is our home can be embraced at one moment and then forgotten about, the actual decision to release the illusion and embrace the truth cannot. As with everything else that pertains to our actual life, this act can only be done one moment at a time.

            The only thing that matters is that we—right now—cease our striving after false gods and become aware of God’s ever-present, perfect love.