THE ROAD TO HOME
“He [God] has set eternity in the hearts of men.” –Ecclesiastes 4:11
When you return home from a trip, there’s usually one spot when your heart says, “I’m almost there.” Maybe it’s spotting your neighborhood from an airplane or across the water to a dock. By land, perhaps it’s a road sign naming your community, or the sign on your street corner.
For me, the relief of “almost home” heightens as the car crests the last hill above the valley of my hometown. At night, street lights glisten in an outline of the city’s triangular map. I know that within minutes I’ll pull into our driveway and see our rose garden.
What if you’re going “home” via a route you’ve never taken, to a “home” you’ve never occupied? That’s what we face in thinking about going to Heaven. But Jesus offers two key assurances. First, the road to heaven begins with how we live. It’s narrow and challenging, not the easy route many choose in life. Jesus said: “Broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it…narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it” (Matt. 7:13-14).
More important, we have a Guide. Jesus will help us get there. When His disciples wondered about the logistics of being transported to Heaven, Jesus kept the explanation simple and comforting: “I will come back and take you to be with me” (John 14:3). It’s like Jesus is the driver and we’re the passengers!
This passage reminds me of traveling with our young children. Early in the trip home, one might whine from the back seat, “Are we home yet?” The other would add, “I miss home.” I’d reply, “Just close your eyes and we’ll get home a lot faster.” If we arrived home at night, they often were asleep as the car pulled into the garage. Their dad and I carefully unbuckled them from their car seats and eased their little wobbly bodies to our shoulders. Unlocking the house, we’d carry them to their rooms and lay them on their beds. We didn’t dare risk wakening them by putting on their pajamas. So we just slipped off their shoes, covered them, and went to bed ourselves. In the morning, they woke up “home.”
Could that be how Jesus will help us on the road to Heaven? Though we’ve never seen our Heavenly home before, we know He will take us safely there. Or, as some say, when we close our eyes on earth, we’ll open them in Heaven.
Every day around the globe, an estimated one-quarter of a million people die. They change their earthly residence. There are only two highways to eternity at death. One leads to the home of God and eternal pleasures, the other away from God to eternal misery. One’s the high road, the other the low road.
As a Christian, astronaut Michael Anderson chose the high road. Knowing the risky nature of space flight, he once told a former pastor that if something bad happened in his mission aboard the space shuttle Columbia, “Don’t worry about me. I’m just going on higher.” He and Rich Husband, the spacecraft’s commander, were members of the same church in Houston and known for their Christian witness. After sixteen days in space, just minutes before its scheduled landing in the early morning of February 1, 2003, the space shuttle Columbia broke apart. All seven aboard died. But at least two crew members, who had publicly declared their faith in Christ, “went higher” with God and landed Home.
The road sign marking the way to Heaven is a cross. It’s why Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”(4) We can’t get to Heaven by our own efforts or by dabbling in religions that leave out Jesus’ death for our sins. We head there by believing in Christ.
Coming to Him in faith releases our longings for Heaven. We feel less at home on earth, and see ourselves more as people on the journey to eternity with God. Oswald Chambers, a classic devotional author, remarked: “Ultimately we realize a deep alienation to all that the world represents, and we recognize that we are ‘strangers and pilgrims on the earth.’”
God has set in our hearts that longing to spend eternity with Him. That’s why we sometimes experience heavenly homesickness. It’s also how God prepares us for that extraordinary welcome to Heaven. You won’t have to ask, “Am I here yet?” And you won’t be homesick any more.
Prayer: Jesus, You know the way to Heaven and I trust you as my Guide. Amen.
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