Who Says You Can't Go Home

I drove away from Women's Bible Fellowship today and turned on the radio. Bon Jovi's "Who Says You Can't Go Home" was playing. (Entry updated with link to song below, from the show CMT Crossroads with Bon Jovi and Sugarland, featuring the very lovely Jennifer Nettles.)

I cranked the volume (the way I always do when Bon Jovi is on) and sang along. I started thinking about how in this song Jon says he's been all around the world and the one place he still wants to go is home. So that got me thinking about Heaven, our ultimate home. Today at WBF we talked about and prayed for several people who might be going to their ultimate homecoming sooner than we'd like. It is such a hard thing to grasp, the fact that Heaven is this glorious, beautiful, safe, pain-free, disease-free place, and yet we on earth have a really difficult time letting people go there. I guess we have an even harder time when we're not sure that's where they are going...but that's a different topic. Perhaps the reason we (Christians) still struggle with death, is that deep down in our God-made souls we know that sickness and hurt are not from God. We want those evils healed, struck-down, abolished, here on earth...RIGHT NOW. We don't want those we love to only find relief in Heaven, we want the power of Christ to break through and change things now.  

My other thoughts about Heaven include this: I think about wanting to get to that place in my everyday life where if God says, "Times up, come on home" that I would be ready and willing because I'd already have been "all around the world." As in: I would have already let Him direct my life in this world into what He wanted it to be, had the kind of relationships He wanted me to have, loved the way He wants me to love.  I want to be ready to go. With so much disease and sickness, and brokeness is this place- Who says you can't go HOME.