DAY 203
Faith in the Midst of a Pandemic
A series of daily reflections for people of faith
by Rev. Robert Bayley, Interim Pastor
Patuxent Presbyterian Church, California, Maryland
pastorrobert@paxpres.org
Week Twenty-nine Saturday 3 October 2020
Longing for a Distant Home
“After months of containment, we understand a little better what it might be like to live on the moon. We have masked up to venture out the front door, floating in wide arcs around masked neighbors, while those unable to leave their homes have peered out the window at a world in orbit. For a period during the coronavirus pandemic, everyone on Earth has experienced the extremes of distance usually reserved for those in the death zone or outer space. In our time, apart, we have felt a longing for the places we can’t go.” - From a current newspaper article: “Longing for a Distant Home in a Time of Pandemic.”
When we talked about going to heaven and standing before Jesus he cried. You could see the longing in his eyes. Yes, he had had a major stroke, and stroke patients seem to cry easily. But I had seen the same tears, the same look in his eyes, before the stroke. So real had been the Lord in his life, so life-changing the relationship, that as the years came and went he found himself increasingly filled with a longing to see the One who had so filled his life with meaning and purpose and peace and forgiveness and hope. By the time he died recently I had known him over fifty-five years and had watched this progressively growing longing develop in his life.
Where has this human tendency to ‘long for a distant home’ come from? C.S. Lewis observed, “If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.” This ‘longing for a distant home’ referenced in the newspaper article is that same distant home God has placed within us all a longing to find, to enter when we die. The pandemic provides us with both an opportunity to reflect on our mortality and on what will happen to us when we die.
Reflective question: If you have no longing for heaven and to see Jesus, what will you do when you die?
Reflective Scripture: Psalm 73:25 – “Whom have I in heaven but you? And being with you, I desire nothing on earth.”
Reflective hymn:
“This World is Not My Home” – Mary Reeves Davis (1929-1999)
This world is not my home I’m just passing through,
My treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue;
The angels beckon me from heaven’s open door,
And I can’t feel at home in this world anymore.
Refrain: O Lord, you know, I have no friend like you,
If heaven’s not my home then Lord what will I do?
The angels beckon me from heaven’s open door,
And I can’t feel at home in this world anymore.
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