Tuesday, August 09, 2011

Home-Sickness

When I was in Korea for a week, I missed everything. From American bathrooms to hamburgers, to home and just knowing where I was. I'm a type of person who likes to know where they are, whether it be a city name or just knowing I'm heading north, south, east or west but in Korea, my sense of direction was completely off. So when I finally knew I was on my way to the airport to go back home, I was excited to know that I was heading in the right direction..that is I was going back home to New York.

But these thoughts crossed my mind while I was slowly approaching the airport, "Why do I want to go home so much?" I did miss things that could only be found at home but I started to ask myself, "Why do I want to leave so badly?" Simply, because Korea wasn't my home. This wasn't the place I was meant to be in. If I had to live in Korea, sure I could survive because it had the things I need to live but I did not belong there. My life was in New York.

I couldn't help but connect this to Narnia because C. S. Lewis does a great job portraying this sense of not belonging and desire for home in The Horse and His Boy. This is similar to the longings within all of us for heaven but I started to realized it was actually for the presence of God. I think we often get confused with what heaven is suppose to be because we see it portrayed with pictures of clouds, angels, a lot of light and halos but heaven is simply being in the presence of God for eternity. That here on earth, as we spend time in His presence, the longing for heaven grows because we get a taste of it and know what it will be like. And just like when I was in Korea and wanted to be back home, so will we start seeing we weren't meant to live here on earth but we were meant to be in heaven, in the presence of God.

I'll finish this post by borrowing something else from C. S. Lewis: “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy because they were there to arouse, to suggest the real thing. That real thing is heaven.”

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